Proofs from THE BOOK


Book Description

According to the great mathematician Paul Erdös, God maintains perfect mathematical proofs in The Book. This book presents the authors candidates for such "perfect proofs," those which contain brilliant ideas, clever connections, and wonderful observations, bringing new insight and surprising perspectives to problems from number theory, geometry, analysis, combinatorics, and graph theory. As a result, this book will be fun reading for anyone with an interest in mathematics.




Book of Proof


Book Description

This book is an introduction to the language and standard proof methods of mathematics. It is a bridge from the computational courses (such as calculus or differential equations) that students typically encounter in their first year of college to a more abstract outlook. It lays a foundation for more theoretical courses such as topology, analysis and abstract algebra. Although it may be more meaningful to the student who has had some calculus, there is really no prerequisite other than a measure of mathematical maturity.




Discrete Mathematics


Book Description

This gentle introduction to discrete mathematics is written for first and second year math majors, especially those who intend to teach. The text began as a set of lecture notes for the discrete mathematics course at the University of Northern Colorado. This course serves both as an introduction to topics in discrete math and as the "introduction to proof" course for math majors. The course is usually taught with a large amount of student inquiry, and this text is written to help facilitate this. Four main topics are covered: counting, sequences, logic, and graph theory. Along the way proofs are introduced, including proofs by contradiction, proofs by induction, and combinatorial proofs. The book contains over 360 exercises, including 230 with solutions and 130 more involved problems suitable for homework. There are also Investigate! activities throughout the text to support active, inquiry based learning. While there are many fine discrete math textbooks available, this text has the following advantages: It is written to be used in an inquiry rich course. It is written to be used in a course for future math teachers. It is open source, with low cost print editions and free electronic editions.




Principia Mathematica


Book Description




The Real Number System


Book Description

Concise but thorough and systematic, this categorical discussion of the real number system presents a series of step-by-step axioms, each illustrated by examples. The highly accessible text is suitable for readers at varying levels of knowledge and experience: advanced high school students and college undergraduates as well as prospective high school and college instructors. The abundance of examples and the wealth of exercises—more than 300, all with answers provided—make this a particularly valuable book for self-study. The first two chapters examine fields and ordered fields, followed by an introduction to natural numbers and mathematical induction. Subsequent chapters explore composite and prime numbers, integers and rational numbers, congruences and finite fields, and polynomials and rational functions. Additional topics include intervals and absolute value, the axiom of completeness, roots and rational exponents, exponents and logarithms, and decimal expansions. A helpful Appendix concludes the text.




Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics


Book Description

An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. In this book, Joel David Hamkins offers an introduction to the philosophy of mathematics that is grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. He treats philosophical issues as they arise organically in mathematics, discussing such topics as platonism, realism, logicism, structuralism, formalism, infinity, and intuitionism in mathematical contexts. He organizes the book by mathematical themes--numbers, rigor, geometry, proof, computability, incompleteness, and set theory--that give rise again and again to philosophical considerations.




Proof Theory


Book Description

Although this is an introductory text on proof theory, most of its contents is not found in a unified form elsewhere in the literature, except at a very advanced level. The heart of the book is the ordinal analysis of axiom systems, with particular emphasis on that of the impredicative theory of elementary inductive definitions on the natural numbers. The "constructive" consequences of ordinal analysis are sketched out in the epilogue. The book provides a self-contained treatment assuming no prior knowledge of proof theory and almost none of logic. The author has, moreover, endeavoured not to use the "cabal language" of proof theory, but only a language familiar to most readers.




The Proof is in the Pudding


Book Description

This text explores the many transformations that the mathematical proof has undergone from its inception to its versatile, present-day use, considering the advent of high-speed computing machines. Though there are many truths to be discovered in this book, by the end it is clear that there is no formalized approach or standard method of discovery to date. Most of the proofs are discussed in detail with figures and equations accompanying them, allowing both the professional mathematician and those less familiar with mathematics to derive the same joy from reading this book.




The Prime Number Conspiracy


Book Description

The Pulitzer Prize–winning magazine’s stories of mathematical explorations show that inspiration strikes haphazardly, revealing surprising solutions and exciting discoveries—with a foreword by James Gleick These stories from Quanta Magazine map the routes of mathematical exploration, showing readers how cutting-edge research is done, while illuminating the productive tension between conjecture and proof, theory and intuition. The stories show that, as James Gleick puts it in the foreword, “inspiration strikes willy-nilly.” One researcher thinks of quantum chaotic systems at a bus stop; another suddenly realizes a path to proving a theorem of number theory while in a friend's backyard; a statistician has a “bathroom sink epiphany” and discovers the key to solving the Gaussian correlation inequality. Readers of The Prime Number Conspiracy, says Quanta editor-in-chief Thomas Lin, are headed on “breathtaking intellectual journeys to the bleeding edge of discovery strapped to the narrative rocket of humanity's never-ending pursuit of knowledge.” Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, Quanta is the only popular publication that offers in-depth coverage of the latest breakthroughs in understanding our mathematical universe. It communicates mathematics by taking it seriously, wrestling with difficult concepts and clearly explaining them in a way that speaks to our innate curiosity about our world and ourselves. Readers of this volume will learn that prime numbers have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them (the “conspiracy” of the title); consider whether math is the universal language of nature (allowing for “a unified theory of randomness”); discover surprising solutions (including a pentagon tiling proof that solves a century-old math problem); ponder the limits of computation; measure infinity; and explore the eternal question “Is mathematics good for you?” Contributors Ariel Bleicher, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Kevin Hartnett, Erica Klarreich, Thomas Lin, John Pavlus, Siobhan Roberts, Natalie Wolchover Copublished with Quanta Magazine




Psychology and Mathematics Education


Book Description

Modern Mathematics is constructed rigorously through proofs, based on truths, which are either axioms or previously proven theorems. Thus, it is par excellence a model of rational inquiry. Links between Cognitive Psychology and Mathematics Education have been particularly strong during the last decades. Indeed, the Enlightenment view of the rational human mind that reasons, makes decisions and solves problems based on logic and probabilities, was shaken during the second half of the twentieth century. Cognitive psychologists discovered that humans' thoughts and actions often deviate from rules imposed by strict normative theories of inference. Yet, these deviations should not be called "errors": as Cognitive Psychologists have demonstrated, these deviations may be either valid heuristics that succeed in the environments in which humans have evolved, or biases that are caused by a lack of adaptation to abstract information formats. Humans, as the cognitive psychologist and economist Herbert Simon claimed, do not usually optimize, but rather satisfice, even when solving problem. This Research Topic aims at demonstrating that these insights have had a decisive impact on Mathematics Education. We want to stress that we are concerned with the view of bounded rationality that is different from the one espoused by the heuristics-and-biases program. In Simon’s bounded rationality and its direct descendant ecological rationality, rationality is understood in terms of cognitive success in the world (correspondence) rather than in terms of conformity to content-free norms of coherence (e.g., transitivity).