How to Think About Analysis

Analysis (sometimes called Real Analysis or Advanced Calculus) is a core subject in most undergraduate mathematics degrees. It is elegant, clever and rewarding to learn, but it is hard. Even the best students find it challenging, and those who are unprepared often find it incomprehensible at first. This book aims to ensure that no student need be unprepared. It is not like other Analysis books. It is not a textbook containing standard content. Rather, it is designed to be read before arriving at university and/or before starting an Analysis course, or as a companion text once a course is begun. It provides a friendly and readable introduction to the subject by building on the student's existing understanding of six key topics: sequences, series, continuity, differentiability, integrability and the real numbers. It explains how mathematicians develop and use sophisticated formal versions of these ideas, and provides a detailed introduction to the central definitions, theorems and proofs, pointing out typical areas of difficulty and confusion and explaining how to overcome these. The book also provides study advice focused on the skills that students need if they are to build on this introduction and learn successfully in their own Analysis courses: it explains how to understand definitions, theorems and proofs by relating them to examples and diagrams, how to think productively about proofs, and how theories are taught in lectures and books on advanced mathematics. It also offers practical guidance on strategies for effective study planning. The advice throughout is research based and is presented in an engaging style that will be accessible to students who are new to advanced abstract mathematics.

It's not like anyone has checked every possible pair of real numbers a and b to
make sure it really is always true that . Philosophically, Platonists believe that the
real numbers are out there and that an axiom like this is a human attempt to
capture ... axiom without knowing its name. But names are useful both for
identifying links across subjects and for effective communication. For instance,
both addition and multiplication are commutative —they share this property so it's
useful to have a.