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Although I never had any difficulty with the - definition, I still found that continuity made
much more sense after I encountered the general topological setting. However, I ended up a settheoretic topologist; after some forty years of teaching mathematics, Im quite certain that this is
a minority experience. Im also quite certain that there is no single right answer to the question of
how to teach continuity in a first rigorous approach: the answer depends not only on the
individual student, but also on the preferences of the instructor. I do think that its worth being
aware of the range of possibilities and some of their strengths and weaknesses.
Im familiar with five approaches to teaching continuity in a rigorous fashion.
1. The traditional - approach. This has the overwhelming advantage of universal
familiarity and use, and the distinct disadvantage that while the intuition underlying
continuity is covariant if x is near a, f(x) is near f(a) the definition is contravariant.
The definition is also , which is logically rather complex. On the other hand, it uses
concrete, quantitative measures of approximation, which for many students is a plus, and
its connection with uniform continuity (and other stronger forms of continuity) is
straightforward.
2. Sequences first, with -N, then f is continuous iff it preserves limits of sequences. The
main advantages are that a sequence is a particularly simple kind of function whose
convergence is easily visualized (it eventually gets inside any given -nbhd and stays
there), and that the definition of continuity is covariant. Its also relatively easy
eventually to move on to the - definition of continuity. The problem with this approach
is that the thinness of sequences tends to obscure whats really going on, namely, that
everything near a is being sent near f(a). It also doesnt generalize well to uniform
continuity, to put it mildly.
3. Open sets. In full generality this is simply too abstract for most students in a first rigorous
encounter with continuity. If we work only with functions on the reals and limit ourselves
to open intervals, it isnt really much different from the - approach. It may make some
of the theory just a hair simpler, but the main advantage is that it makes the
generalization to Rn easier: open boxes are more convenient than open (Euclidean) balls.
On the other hand, general open intervals arent as concrete a notion of approximation as
-nbhds.
4. An abstract nearness relation. This approach was outlined in P. Cameron, J. G. Hocking
and S. A. Naimpally, Nearness A Better Approach to Continuity and Limits, The
American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 81, No. 7 (Aug. - Sep., 1974), pp. 739-745]. It has
the advantage of a covariant definition of continuity, of treating convergence of
sequences as just another instance of continuity, and of having a very intuitive
underpinning. It has the disadvantage of being very much outside the mainstream, so that
one must eventually derive the more usual characterizations of continuity anyway. One
pays for the more intuitive introduction by having to spend extra time introducing the
standard approach, and its not clear to me whether theres a net benefit. One definite
strength of the approach, however, is that it yields uniform continuity in a very

straightforward way: one simply replaces the notion of a point being near a set with the
notion of a set being near another set, thereby getting a proximity space.
5. Infinitesimals. The classic example of this approach is H. Jerome Keisler, Elementary
Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach; another example is Keith Stroyan, Foundations of
Infinitesimal Calculus. Pretty much everything that I said about the nearness approach
applies here as well, including the ease of defining uniform continuity. The main
differences are that the preliminaries are a bit more complicated, but the payoff is in my
view a bit greater: rigorous infinitesimals are, I think, more useful than the axiomatized
notion of nearness used in (4).
There is a strong pragmatic argument for (1) or (2), especially in a school that has a lot of
transfer students. One can make pretty good pdagogical arguments for (4) and (5), but in most
situations they well may be overridden by practical concerns. In practice some combination of
ideas from (1), (2), and (3) is likely to be as effective as anything.

People who go on to become professional users of advanced mathematics generally have

a different standard of "understandable" than people who don't. Frankly, if I were writing
an introductory real analysis book for people who could be counted on to do things like
hold multiple equivalent definitions of an object in their heads, to the point that they can
compare and contrast them and form a favorite, the book I would produce would be very
different from the standard real analysis textbook. But that isn't the world in which those
books are written.
I guess what I'm saying is although you might feel it's more "understandable" to do it that
way, I suspect that if the books actually did that, many would be flummoxed by open sets
and happy when they got to and . The only people who would be happy in either world
are the ones for whom the choice makes no difference. (This reminds me, a little bit, of
people who have a favorite set-theoretic construction of R from the ring of natural
numbers, with pedagogical justifications for their favorite. For most people, any
construction of R from anything is going to be a huge stumbling block--- huge, that is,
compared to the size of any pedagogical choice made about how to do it.)

The other obvious choices for a definition of continuity require forming a mental image
of very large sets: the collection of all open subsets of R, or the collection of all
convergent sequences with a given limit. Many people struggle with conceptualizing such
large collections--- and try to base proofs involving them on misconceptions of what an
arbitrary element of such a collection must "look like." (You will see this no matter when
you talk about open sets.)
At most schools, the introductory real analysis class must also accommodate the needs of
future teachers of K-12 mathematics, and people whose future jobs will not involve
mathematics at all (but whose majors require one advanced math class). Many of these
people will not be happy with any precise definitions, because definitions are used for
writing proofs, and they don't see any point in writing proofs. The current choice is partly
an acknowledgement to this reality, I think, because...
...the - definition of continuity is perhaps the closest of many possibilities to the
"intuitive" conception of continuity given in calculus classes (f is continuous at c if for

however strictly you interpret , you can always ensure that f(x)f(c) by taking x
sufficiently close to c).
I do think that, for a population of future proof writers, the open sets definition should
definitely get more emphasis than playing with and . (But you can use nothing but the
- definition, and still minimize the amount of playing with and . It comes down to
writing style. I can't defend the writing style of many real analysis textbooks, but I feel
these issues usually go far beyond just what choices are made in the definitions.)

How do you define an open subset of R? Maybe: a set G is open if for all g in G there are
a and b in G satisfying a<g<b and (a,b)G. OK. To verify from a given subset of R is
open from this definition (and not from nice theorems about the sets that satisfy the
conditions of this definition), you need to fix g's, and produce a's and b's making the
above claim true. But this is a Roman letter version of what you probably don't like about
and .
Let me expand on my comment.
Towards your question: I think that tolerances >0 and allowances >0 are things with a
size and thus are much more tangible than open sets and other ghosts from general
topology.
In my view the basic notion is that of continuity. A function f is continuous at x0 (think of
x0:=) if inputting a value x near x0 results in a function value that is not far off the actual
value f(x0). Now of course we need a numerical version of this idea. One would be happy
when

|f(x)f(x0)||xx0| ,

i.e., if the error in the output were at most as large as the error in the input, and we would
be content, if there were a constant C>0 such that

|f(x)f(x0)|C|xx0| .

When f satisfies such a condition it is called Lipschitz-continuous. Unfortunately there are

cases where we have continuity in an intuitive sense, but there is no such C, e.g.,
f(x):=x at 0. This brings us to a more involved definition , and on, and on.
Central to all computing is the fact that the basic arithmetic operations in R and C are
continuous. This is proven via simple inequalities and has as a consequence all the rules
about limits of sums etc. we learn later.
Concerning limits: A function f has limit for x if defining f():= would make it
continuous there.
One reason for the traditional setup (starting with and ) may be that not all questions in
real analysis can be reduced to topology alone. Depending on the curriculum, the need to
connect the material with prior exposure to calculus may also play a role.
Although the definition of continuity via open sets is elegant and effective, I do not think
it to be particularly intuitive for beginners. It also does not give a good description of
continuity at a point. Instead I prefer to define continuity via neighbourhoods. This
approach is used e.g. in the books of Jameson "Topology and normed spaces" or Brown
"Elements of modern Topology". The advantage is that you can start with the notion of a

system of neighbourhoods of a point (the only condition being that a neighbourhood U of

a point x must satisfy xU) and state the definitions for a map to be continuous
f:XY is continuous at a point xX if for every neighbourhood Uf(x) there is a
neighbourhood Vx with f(V)U.
f:XY is continuous if it is continuous at every point xX.
before you go into the precise conditions for a neighbourhood system. In particular you
can take open intervals or open disks in the plane as examples of neighbourhoods and
provide pictures. This can then also be translated into the statements, but the intuition
can be built first.

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