Roel Snieder holds the Keck Foundation Endowed Chair of Basic Exploration Science at the Colorado School of Mines. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Dean of the Faculty of Earth Sciences at the University of Utrecht. Snieder has served on the editorial boards of Geophysical Journal International, Inverse Problems, Reviews of Geophysics, and the European Journal of Physics. In 2000, he was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He is co-author of the textbook The Art of Being a Scientist: A Guide for Graduate Students and their Mentors (Cambridge University Press, 2009). From 2003 to 2011, he was a member of the Earth Science Council of the US Department of Energy. In 2008, Snieder worked for the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University on outreach and education on global energy. That same year, he was a founding member of the humanitarian organization Geoscientists Without Borders, where he served as chair until 2013. In 2011, he was elected Honorary Member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists.

1. Introduction; 2. Dimensional analysis; 3. Power series; 4. Spherical and cylindrical coordinates; 5. Gradient; 6. Divergence of a vector field; 7. Curl of a vector field; 8. Theorem of Gauss; 9. Theorem of Stokes; 10. The Laplacian; 11. Scale analysis; 12. Linear algebra; 13. Dirac delta function; 14. Fourier analysis; 15. Analytic functions; 16. Complex integration; 17. Green's functions: principles; 18. Green's functions: examples; 19. Normal modes; 20. Potential-field theory; 21. Probability and statistics; 22. Inverse problems; 23. Perturbation theory; 24. Asymptotic evaluation of integrals; 25. Conservation laws; 26. Cartesian tensors; 27. Variational calculus; 28. Epilogue on power and knowledge.