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Counterexamples in Analysis (Dover Books on Mathematics)

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It can happen to anybody. There you are, minding your own business, when the though hits you: Does every continuous function have a derivative somewhere? You try to prove that it must. It sure seems like it must. How could it not? Hours slip by, and you've made no progress. What do you do? You pick up Gelbaum and Olmsted's classic "Counterexamples in Analysis". There on page 38 is an example of a continuous function that has no derivative; none; anywhere. No wonder you couldn't prove it.

It turns out that questions of the form "Does A always imply B?" entail proofs with two very different flavors, depending on whether the answer is affirmative or negative. The affirmative variety can be very difficult, as it usually deals with an infinity of things. But a negative answer requires only one solitary example of an A that is not a B; this is affectionately known as a "counter-example". These are the slickest little proofs around--often a one liner--and they can provide a lot of insight. Here's a trickier one: Are all linear functions continuous? Surprisingly, the answer is "no", which means there is a counter-example. Gelbaum and Olmsted show how to construct a discontinuous linear function. Case closed. They also provide examples of

A perfect nowhere dense set

A linear function space that is a lattice but not an algebra

A connected compact set that is not an arc

A divergent series whose general term approaches zero

A nonuniform limit of bounded functions that is not bounded

I won't give away any more (although there are hundreds). The book has chapters on real numbers, functions and limits, differentiation, sequences, infinite series, set and measure on the real axis, functions of two variables, metric and topological spaces, and more. Each section begins with a brief summary of the basic concepts and definitions, then launches into a list of terse counter-examples. This is simply indispensable for students of mathematical analysis, as it can help to explain why you cannot weaken those seemingly stringent hypotheses to various theorems; if you do, one of these quirky counter-examples will rush in and ruin your day. This is a great book to have on hand. I highly recommend it. (I won't tell you how it ends.)

In my teaching of the basic tools of mathematical analysis; and even going back to my student days, I noticed the hurdle that separates the beautiful definitions from the `messy' examples. Often students tell me that the theory looks so easy, `but how do we construct an example to illustrate the limits of the theory?' -----A counter example?
Part of the difficulty is that the definitions involve quantifiers; and how do you check the quantifier `for all' ? And on top of that, there are the axioms of set theory: the axiom of choice, or one of its equivalent variants.

The lovely little book by Gelbaum-Olmsted was a savior to many of us when we started out in math, and it appeared first in 1961. But I had almost forgotten about it until by accident (while browsing in the bookstore) I stumbled over a new edition of it about a year ago, a lovely Dover reprinted edition. And so affordable !

In all the other books you learn about the wonderful things that are true about convergence, sets on the line or in the plane, modern variants of the so called Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, and in Gelbaum-Olmstead you learn the things that aren't true. And then there are all the lovely Cantor constructions, The Devil's Staircase, space filling curves, and much more; beautiful, but little known constructions going back to Lebesgue, and some to Riemann.

But more importantly the book gives students an edge when they have to do the assigned exercises in your analysis course. Many told me that the book is a 'secret weapon'.

Palle Jorgensen, October 2004.

For 200 years after it was invented by Isaac Newton, calculus lacked a rigorous foundation. In the 1800's the missing rigor was finally provided by the ingenious theory of limits, developed by Bolzano, Cauchy, Weierstrass, and others. This development, in turn, revealed the need to formulate and understand the structure of the real numbers, which was achieved by Cantor, Dedekind, and Peano, who showed how the real numbers can be constructed from rational numbers, which are in turn constructed from integers, which are defined in terms of set theory.

But it was a Faustian bargain, because immediately a host of bizarre and counterintuitive examples were discovered - continuous functions that were nowhere differentiable, nonmeasurable sets, one-to-one pairing of points between the line and the plane. These peculiar entities were deeply disturbing to many.

Poincare said "Logic sometimes makes monsters. For half a century we have seen a mass of bizarre functions which appear to be forced to resemble as little as possible honest functions which serve some purpose... In former times when one invented a new function it was for a practical purpose; today one invents them purposely to show up defects in the reasoning of our fathers and one will deduce from them only that."

These counterexamples displayed features that were nowhere to be found in the physical universe. When Richard Feynman was a physics graduate student at Princeton, he enjoyed teasing his mathematician friends that mathematics was so easy that he could instantly decide the truth or falsehood of any mathematical statement they could give him. One day they challenged him with the grand-daddy of all the paradoxes, the Banach-Tarski Paradox: That the unit ball in R3 could be divided into a finite number of pieces, and the pieces could, by rigid translation and rotation, be reassembled into two unit balls. But they blundered: instead of saying "unit ball in R3", they said "orange", and Feynman pointed out that the nonmeasurable pieces, that they had so rigorously defined, must split apart even every electron of the orange.

When I was a graduate student in mathematics, "Counterexamples in Analysis" was my favorite book, and I had a lot of fun amazing my fellow students by quoting from it. Since then, however, I have swung around more to the viewpoint of Poincare and Feynman: "Logic sometimes makes monsters." From either viewpoint, however, the counterexamples are immensely entertaining.

In this book, the authors present counterexamples of notions that seem "obvious" by handwaving or instinct. Some of the (counter)examples are well-known (ordered space which is cauchy complete but not complete) and some are highly contrived (two non homeomorphic topological spaces which is countinuous one-to-one image of each other). The latter category is what makes this book useful.

You cant learn analysis by reading this book -- but you can learn how analysis works. I personally recommend this book to those who wants to work in analysis at least until graduate school. Mastering the book is a good preparation for oral exams and quals, and would increase your general understanding of the subject.

Topics range from real number system, differentiation and integration, sequence and series, measure to function in two variables, plane sets, topological space and function space.

It's a pity that this book is out of print. You learn all this wonderful theorems at the colleg. But where are the limits? Why some theorems have so strange assumption? Well, this books will provide you with answers, sometimes surprising ones. For example: Two functions whose squares are Lebesgue-integrable and the square of whose sum is not Lebesgue-integrable. And this book is full of examples of this kind, nearly 240 answers to a wide area of basic analysis. One of the advantages of this book: You must not seek for a long time to find the example you are looking for. The examples are sorted in chapters each covering a distinct part of analysis. At last let me cite Mr. Gelbaum himself to characterize the scope of his book: "At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that (aside from definitions, statements and hard work) mathematics consists of two classes - proofs and counterexamples, and the mathematical discovery is directed toward two major goals - the formulation of proofs and and the construction of counterexamples." And cursing Goedel, if none of both succeeds. "Most mathematical books concentrate on the first class, the body of proofs of true statements. In the present volume we adress ourselves to the second class of mathematical objects, the counterexamples for false statements."

I wish I had this book when I took my first undergraduate analysis course.

Up until analysis, math is easy and intuitive to just about everyone who pays attention at each step because everything studied is built upon concepts learned in grade school. You know what a triangle is, so trigonometry makes sense. You know what a rectangle is, so low level calculus makes some sense (though as it is normally taught, there appears to be some mathematical voodoo going on when dealing with limits and such).

Then analysis hits, and every student has to deal with concepts that, at the time, appear arcane and bizarre. Open and closed sets? Compactness? Sequences and series? Where did all this stuff come from, and where is the familiar math as used by engineers?

That's where this book shines. Best used as a supplement to standard analysis text, its primary virtue is that it makes all of these strange new concepts easy to grasp. Each chapter gives a brief review of concepts you might vaguely remember from prior reading or a professor's lecture, and after that it launches into useful examples that render the concepts clear and provide motivation for having a good working knowledge of the material.

This results in, as others have pointed out, a good development of intuition for analysis, and that intuition becomes the bedrock for future success. Many students limp away from intro analysis with a shaky grasp of the material that only solidifies when the same concepts show up again in future courses. This book eases that burden and erases some of the feeling of playing catch-up when the really strange stuff comes along later.

This book is an incredible help to those trying to learn analysis. It does a great job showing which "obvious" statements are actually false in a clear and concise way. When theorems seem too abstract the counterexamples in this incredibly cheap book come to the rescue.

Even if you have no trouble with the theory you will need to have examples in your head to do later proofs, especially in other subjects such as functional analysis.

This should be a companion course text it's so useful.

The counterexamples here are a wonderful aid to educating intuition about definitions in Real Variables. It may sound strange, but I always thought of this book as entertaining reading: If you glance at the table of contents, you'll may find youself saying, "wait, no, that can't -- well, I guess so, but what does that look like?" In later conversations you may find youself saying: "wait a second, I seem to recall seeing somewhere a continuous nowhere differentiable function," or someting of the sort. Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of these creatures in the book, but they are worth spending some (enjoyable) time with.

Like the authors warned, I would've liked it if there were some counterexamples I thought of put in the book, but I realize this is technically infeasible.

Really, this book acts as a handy reference. "Oh, is this true? (look for counterexample) Maybe it is/No it's not." It helps quicken the learning experience quite a bit. The fact that it's only around $10 also makes it handier.

All the positive reviews here are true. This is an awesome book that every serious math student should own, especially graduate students preparing for qualification exams. And unlike so many graduate level works this one is a bargain in a well made Dover edition. As one reviewer notes "Just get it".