The primary objective of this monograph is to develop an elementary and self­ contained approach to the mathematical theory of a viscous incompressible fluid in a domain 0 of the Euclidean space ]Rn, described by the equations of Navier­ Stokes. The book is mainly directed to students familiar with basic functional analytic tools in Hilbert and Banach spaces. However, for readers' convenience, in the first two chapters we collect without proof some fundamental properties of Sobolev spaces, distributions, operators, etc. Another important objective is to formulate the theory for a completely general domain O. In particular, the theory applies to arbitrary unbounded, non-smooth domains. For this reason, in the nonlinear case, we have to restrict ourselves to space dimensions n = 2,3 that are also most significant from the physical point of view. For mathematical generality, we will develop the lin­ earized theory for all n 2 2. Although the functional-analytic approach developed here is, in principle, known to specialists, its systematic treatment is not available, and even the diverse aspects available are spread out in the literature. However, the literature is very wide, and I did not even try to include a full list of related papers, also because this could be confusing for the student. In this regard, I would like to apologize for not quoting all the works that, directly or indirectly, have inspired this monograph.