Timeline for Alternative undergraduate analysis texts
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 27, 2012 at 20:31 | comment | added | Margaret Friedland | I agree with Victor, having taught from Abbott in 2002 and 2003. The biggest drawback is the discussion of derivatives without any mention of tangents. | |
| Jun 29, 2011 at 5:42 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | I've just taught from Abbott and I was very annoyed by the overly casual style. I don't mean freshness of the exposition, that's wonderful, just the sad fact lots of things are either left to the reader to figure out or are explained carelessly (typical example: the proof of existence of the square root of 2 in Chapter 1). For inexperienced students, it's a disaster, and regardless of the level, if one cannot assign the proofs to be read in the text, what use is the text? While I love Cantor set as a unifying theme in a real analysis course, nearly everything else about this book is negative. | |
| Mar 3, 2010 at 22:07 | comment | added | John Stillwell | I have taught from Abbott's Understanding Analysis, and it worked well. However, I do think it is slightly "dangerous" in the sense that Abbott uses the sequential definition of continuity in place of epsilon-delta, without any warning that the equivalence of these two definitions depends on the axiom of choice. | |
| Jan 25, 2010 at 0:29 | comment | added | lhf | Don't miss the MAA Review, which starts like this: "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" | |
| Dec 31, 2009 at 18:17 | history | answered | lhf | CC BY-SA 2.5 |