Much of the time of the average graduate student in economics is spentlearning a new language, that of mathematics. Although the investment doeseventually pay off in many ways, the learning process can be quite painful.I know because I have been there. I remember the long nights spent puzzlingover the mysteries of the Hamiltonian, the frustration of not understandinga single one of the papers in my second macroeconomics readinglist, the culture shock that came with the transition from the undergraduatetextbooks, with their familiar diagrams and intuitive explanations, intoDebreu's Theory of Value, and my despair before the terse and incrediblydry prose of the mathematics texts where I sought enlightenment about thearcane properties of contractions.