This Preparatory School will provide a concise overview of key concepts that might not be so familiar to several of the participants, but that will be important to fully benefit from the more specialized lectures during the Winter College. The lectures will include reviews of general subjects in physics such as electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics, as well as of more specialized ones such as statistical optics and the angular momentum of light. Relevant mathematical techniques including linear algebra and Fourier theory will also be covered. The lectures will be supplemented with two lab sessions and a computer simulation session, in order to illustrate some of the topics in the lectures.