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The Foundations of Mathematics

by , (OUP Oxford)

(93 reviews)

£9.49 £14.99 Save 37%

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The transition from school mathematics to university mathematics is seldom straightforward. Students are faced with a disconnect between the algorithmic and informal attitude to mathematics at school, versus a new emphasis on proof, based on logic, and a more abstract development of general concepts, based on set theory.

The authors have many years' experience of the potential difficulties involved, through teaching first-year undergraduates and researching the ways in which students and mathematicians think. The book explains the motivation behind abstract foundational material based on students' experiences of school mathematics, and explicitly suggests ways students can make sense of formal ideas.

This second edition takes a significant step forward by not only making the transition from intuitive to formal methods, but also by reversing the process- using structure theorems to prove that formal systems have visual and symbolic interpretations that enhance mathematical thinking. This is exemplified by a new chapter on the theory of groups.

While the first edition extended counting to infinite cardinal numbers, the second also extends the real numbers rigorously to larger ordered fields. This links intuitive ideas in calculus to the formal epsilon-delta methods of analysis. The approach here is not the conventional one of 'nonstandard analysis', but a simpler, graphically based treatment which makes the notion of an infinitesimal natural and straightforward.

This allows a further vision of the wider world of mathematical thinking in which formal definitions and proof lead to amazing new ways of defining, proving, visualising and symbolising mathematics beyond previous expectations.

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  • We started tracking this book on February 21, 2019.
  • This book was £12.78 when we started tracking it.
  • The price of this book has changed 18 times in the past 1,862 days.
  • The current price of this book is £9.49 last checked 6 hours ago.
  • This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
  • The lowest price to date was £9.06 last reached on June 17, 2020.
  • This book has been £9.06 one time since we started tracking it.
  • The highest price to date was £14.99 last reached on August 19, 2022.
  • This book has been £14.99 one time since we started tracking it.

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Additional Info

  • Text-to-Speech: Disabled
  • Lending: Disabled
  • Print Length: 412 Pages
  • File Size: 9,611 KB

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