Section 1.1 What is This Book All About?
This book is intended to be used for a one-semester/quarter introduction to proof course (sometimes referred to as a transition to proof course). The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the process of constructing and writing formal and rigorous mathematical proofs. The intended audience is mathematics majors and minors. However, this book is also appropriate for anyone curious about mathematics and writing proofs. Most users of this book will have taken at least one semester of calculus, although other than some familiarity with a few standard functions in Chapter 8, content knowledge of calculus is not required. The book includes more content than one can expect to cover in a single semester/quarter. This allows the instructor/reader to pick and choose the sections that suit their needs and desires. Each chapter takes a focused approach to the included topics, but also includes many gentle exercises aimed at developing intuition.
The following sections form the core of the book and are likely the sections that an instructor would focus on in a one-semester introduction to proof course.
Time permitting, instructors can pick and choose topics from the remaining sections. I typically cover the core sections listed above together with Chapter 6: Three Famous Theorems during a single semester. The Instructor Guide contains examples of a few possible paths through the material, as well as information about which sections and theorems depend on material earlier in the book.
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.―Bertrand Russell, philosopher & mathematician
