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This is a dangerous book.

Understanding Analysis is so well-written and the development


of the theory so well-motivated that exposing students to it could well lead them to
expect such excellence in all their textbooks. It might not be a good idea to create such
expectations. You might not want to adopt this text unless you're comfortable teaching
from a book in which the exposition will nearly always be clearer than your lectures.
Understanding Analysis is perfectly titled; if your students read it, that's what's going to
happen.

Teaching a one-semester introduction to real analysis can be a tricky business — on the


one hand the entire point of the course is to construct, in excruciating detail, the
theoretical underpinnings of calculus. On the other hand, going to such extraordinary
lengths to prove theorems that the students already know to be true (and have never
doubted) can seem to them a deliberate exercise in obfuscation. Let's face it, none of us
has ever convinced a student that x2 is continuous with an epsilon-delta argument. Of
course, we don't really make the argument for that purpose; our real purpose
(usually unstated) is to convince them that our definition of continuity is reasonable
— the average student usually misses this point entirely. The obvious solution to the
dilemma is to present the problems and the counter-intuitive examples that informed and
motivated the theory in the first place. One can be tempted, and I admit I was tempted, to
attempt a historically accurate presentation of the subject. There exists a terrific book by
David Bressoud for those brave (or foolhardy) enough to take this radical approach. I
think this is a mistake for a first pass through the theory and, if a student is only going to
see this material once, she should get the cleaned-up, elegant, modern version. Future
mathematicians, high-school teachers and the historically inclined can then be exposed to
a historical treatment and be in a much better position to understand the evolution of the
ideas if they are not also simultaneously trying to assimilate the technical details.

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.

Of course no text is perfect and no mathematical book review is complete without


quibbles: the standard proof of the chain rule is presented with no intuitive
explanation, just a warning that it's a trick. The chapter on power series is
motivated by a discussion of Francis Galton's use of branching processes. While
interesting, this is somewhat ahistorical; I think Euler's computation of the sum of
the reciprocals of the squares would be a much better choice (or, if that's too tired
and overdone, maybe Newton's derivation of the binomial theorem and/or the
arcsine series).

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.

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