A Transition to Advanced Mathematics

By Douglas Smith, Maurice Eggen, Richard St. Andre, et al.

Book Overview

A TRANSITION TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS helps you bridge the gap between calculus and advanced math courses. The most successful text of its kind, the 8th edition continues to provide a firm foundation in major concepts needed for continued study and guides you to think and express yourself mathematically--to analyze a situation, extract pertinent facts, and draw appropriate conclusions. The authors present introductions to modern algebra and analysis and place continuous emphasis throughout on improving your ability to read and write proofs, and on developing their critical awareness for spotting common errors in proofs. Concepts are clearly explained and supported with detailed examples, while abundant and diverse exercises provide thorough practice on both routine and more challenging problems. You will come away with a solid intuition for the types of mathematical reasoning you'll need to apply in later courses and a better understanding of how mathematicians of all kinds approach and solve problems. You will be exposed to a large number of examples and exercises that allow you to practice developing the skills needed to help them write and think like a mathematician.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1285463269
• ISBN13: 9781285463261
• Release Date: August 2014
• Publisher: Cengage Learning
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great logic. Easy read.

Needed this book for class. It is an easy read book. Gives great and useful examples for the assignment. Contains selected solutions in the back of the book.

satisfactory/great

This product was in great condition and arrived on time. This text was highly useful in my proofs course. There were helpful examples and thorough instructions.

Fantastic introduction to set theory and proof writing

This book was used as the primary text for one of my college math classes and I immediately fell in love with it. It serves as an excellent primer for set theory and proof writing. The book is clearly written and covers topic in enough detail for readers to understand, but not more detail than necessary. The book delves a bit into groups as well, serving as an excellent text to begin learning the fundamentals of group theory. I recommend this book for anyone who wishes to learn to write proofs with a focus in set theory.

An excellent book

This is an excellent book for those wishing to make it into advanced mathematics - probability, measure etc. The exercises are not difficult. They are fairly easy. The proofs that are left for the students to complete are not difficult at all. In fact, the first half of the proofs are generally given in the text. I do not see the need to know number theory to understand this book (as another reviewer had suggested). The current price is prohibitive - I paid less than a third of its current price more than a decade ago!

excellent - especially for future math teachers

The heart of the book is exercises in grading proofs. These are very useful - especially to future teachers.There is a lot of overlap between the first four chapters of this book and what is often taught in discrete math but the book is more thorough and rigorous. In addition, there is a chapter on cardinality, and introductions to abstract algebra and real analysis.Teachers may not get a chance to take many upper level undergraduate courses that are oriented to math majors. This book is a transition to math for mathematicians (rather than engineers and science students) and covers the fundamentals in a very accessible manner.