The landlady, landlord, cat, trap, and cheese all take credit for catching the long-tailed rat who is really the only one who knows the truth of the matter.

The primarily objective of the book is to serve as a primer on the theory of bounded linear operators on separable Hilbert space. The book presents the spectral theorem as a statement on the existence of a unique continuous and measurable functional calculus. It discusses a proof without digressing into a course on the Gelfand theory of commutative Banach algebras. The book also introduces the reader to the basic facts concerning the various von Neumann–Schatten ideals, the compact operators, the trace-class operators and all bounded operators.