We are deeply grateful to our families for their unconditional support.

Special thanks to Geneviève Gauthier, Carole Bernard and Christiane Lemieux for their impact on our first years of teaching this material. Many thanks to colleagues from both academia and industry who took some of their precious time to review one or several chapters of earlier versions of the book: (in alphabetical order) Maciej Augustyniak, Jean-François Bégin, Bruno Gagnon, Ron Gebhardtsbauer, Jonathan Grégoire, Anne MacKay, Clarence Simard, Tommy Thomassin and Marie-Claude Vachon. Your comments were greatly appreciated and helped improve our book.

We also wish to thank the students who have attended our lectures for their feedback. This book is for you.

Finally, warm thanks to Jean-Mathieu Potvin for turning our handwritten plots into beautiful TikZ figures, to Christel Jackson Book for carefully reviewing each and every example and exercise, and to Adel Benlagra who also contributed to solve and revise exercises in the first half of the book. All remaining errors and typos are ours.