Customer Reviews

Closer and Closer: Introducing Real Analysis

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I took real analysis as a freshman without very much "mathematical maturity," so I am glad the professor chose this book instead of the classic Rudin text, which was used in a later course. This book tries to give hints and explain the motivations and moves that occur in proofs, which made the subject matter a lot easier to understand. I would recommend it for someone like me (early undergraduate) but if you've got some experience with the material, go with the Rudin.

I picked this book at random from the library. Might deserve more than 3 stars, might deserve less.

Anyway, I'm just getting tired of my own half-*ss understanding of certain mathematical terminology and procedures and exactly which concepts they r refering to.

The nice thing about this text--that i've seen so far--is that u can still understand what's going on, even when the author gets a little crazy. For example, "Thus a function has three ingredients: a set of inputs, a set of outputs, and a procedure by which we associate elements in the first set with elements in the second set."

So much crazy baggage in that statement. Inputs, outputs, and procedures all imply notions of time and causality. I can assure u as a fairly successful equation-slinger that the type of equations that represent systems with inputs and ouputs don't look exactly like mathematical functions of the f(x)=x+1. From the perspective of an hard science, these mathematical functions have no causality (functions based on time-varying or time-invariant differential equations can be justly said to have inputs and outputs and even "procedures"). Anyway, here each pair of points happen at the same time. To think otherwise, is irrational.

Silly Rabbit, trix are for kids. Still, silly rabbits like silly thought moments don't detract from the taste or the text. So i'm pretty happy with the author so far. Hey, I always thought, even if trix r for kids, the Rabbit should get to eat some of the trix too (he's on the box for darn sake!).