  This book is not meant to be another compendium of select inequalities, nor
does it claim to contain the latest or the slickest ways of proving them. This
project is rather an attempt at describing how most functional inequalities are
not merely the byproduct of ingenious guess work by a few wizards among us, but
are often manifestations of certain natural mathematical structures and
physical phenomena. Our main goal here is to show how this point of view leads
to "systematic" approaches for not just proving the most basic functional
inequalities, but also for understanding and improving them, and for devising
new ones - sometimes at will, and often on demand.
