This is an elementary text, aimed at first-year undergraduates, which has been designed to bridge the gap between school and university mathematics and to emphasise the importance of proofs - both how to follow a proof and how to construct a proof. The book lays the foundation for most of the key subjects studied in an undergraduate degree program, and provides numerous exercises and a bibliography with suggestions for further and background reading.

Klappentext

In mathematics we are interested in why a particular formula is true. Intuition and statistical evidence are insufficient, so we need to construct a formal logical proof. The purpose of this book is to describe why such proofs are important, what they are made of, how to recognize valid ones, how to distinguish different kinds, and how to construct them. This book is written for 1st year students with no previous experience of formulating proofs. Dave Johnson has drawn from his considerable experience to provide a text that concentrates on the most important elements of the subject using clear, simple explanations that require no background knowledge of logic. It gives many useful examples and problems, many with fully-worked solutions at the end of the book. In addition to a comprehensive index, there is also a useful Dramatis Personae an index to the many symbols introduced in the text, most of which will be new to students and which will be used throughout their degree programme.

Inhalt

1. Numbers.- 1.1 Arithmetic Progressions.- 1.2 Proof by Contradiction.- 1.3 Proof by Contraposition.- 1.4 Proof by Induction.- 1.5 Inductive Definition.- 1.6 The Well-ordering Principle.- 2. Logic.- 2.1 Propositions.- 2.2 Truth Tables.- 2.3 Syllogisms.- 2.4 Quantifiers.- 3. Sets.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Operations.- 3.3 Laws.- 3.4 The Power Set.- 4. Relations.- 4.1 Equivalence Relations.- 4.2 Congruences.- 4.3 Number Systems.- 4.4 Orderings.- 5. Maps.- 5.1 Terminology and Notation.- 5.2 Examples.- 5.3 Injections, Surjections and Bijections.- 5.4 Peano's Axioms.- 6. Cardinal Numbers.- 6.1 Cardinal Arithmetic.- 6.2 The Cantor-Schroeder-Bernstein theorem.- 6.3 Countable Sets.- 6.4 Uncountable Sets.- Solutions to Exercises.- Guide to the Literature.- Dramatis Personae.