Mark Hunacek received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University, and also acquired a wife who that year had also gotten a mathematics Ph.D. Faced with the familiar "two body problem", which was more of an issue in 1978 than it is now, he went to law school and then spent almost three decades practicing law. After retiring from the practice of law, things came full circle and he was lucky enough to be offered a position in the mathematics department at Iowa State University, where, as one of his responsibilities, he redesigned and oversaw the two quantitative literacy courses offered there, one of which inspired this textbook. In 2021 he retired and became a Teaching Professor Emeritus.