Preface
I would like to start by explaining how I came to write this book, and to acknowledge its influences and the help I have received along the way.
I have been extremely fortunate. I have a wonderful wife and two wonderful grown-up children, and I have had all but thirty years working for Shell, which provided an environment that had stimulating challenges and opportunities to look more deeply at problems than is often the case.
I first came across computers in 1971. My undergraduate course was in Chemical Engineering at Leeds University, and we all had to learn how to write basic Fortran programs in our first year. I went on to do a PhD, which involved mathematical modeling of chemical processes and led to my developing an automatic ...