Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Thus a first course in analysis becomes a delicate balancing act between motivation and
rigor. Steve Abbott's balance is nearly perfect. His text presents the standard topics of
one-variable real analysis in the standard order. The distinguishing features are: the clear
and easy prose style — this guy's writing is like a comfortable old shoe; the intuition-
forward presentation — most concepts are tried out and walked around a little in the text
before we get down to the nitty gritty; and the opening section of each chapter which
presents a real problem that the rest of the chapter is designed to solve. Chapter two,
infinite series, begins with a section on the pitfalls of rearrangement and asks what
meaning can be attributed to a double summation. The chapter on continuity presents
some (for us) old friends, Dirichlet's and Thomae's functions, and asks what sets can be
sets of discontinuities of a function. Every chapter also concludes with i) a project section
in which the chapter topic is explored more deeply but the proofs are only hinted at,
filling in the missing details makes for a challenging exam or oral presentation project,
and ii) a historical epilogue.
I should also mention that there are plenty of lovely exercises including many of a type I
believe are particularly pedagogically potent, to wit: Construct an example of an object
(function, sequence, series) that has property X (differentiability, convergence, absolute
convergence), but does not have property Y (bounded derivative, reciprocals converge,
absolute convergence when squared), or prove that no such object exists. (Oh, and a
friendly tip — make sure you can do the exercise on the existence of uncountable
anti-chains in the power set of N before you assign it, the author just might not
respond to your panicked e-mail request for a hint before class meets!)
This terrific book will become the text of choice for the single-variable introductory
analysis course; take a look at it next time you're preparing that class.