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Tell HN: I am going to host "Real Analysis" book club meetings

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Re: Tell HN: I am going to host "Real Analysis" book club meetings

#31

Post by ilovecrows »

zeitgeistcowboy wrote: post #20
impendia wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a math professor, who got through most of Rudin as an undergrad. Felt like a form of hazing at the time ;) In my opinion, Rudin is a great book if you're reading it under the guidance of a good teacher. For self-study, I don't know of any particular alternative to recommend, but I would select something more "talky" -- i.e. which goes more into the background, motivation, and philosophy of the subject.

I was a CS undergrad at MIT and took the fancy math people’s analysis class for a math requirement and they used Rudin and it killed me. We went through like 170 pages of it for one semester. The professor was Sigurdur Helgason. I went into office hours one day and ask him a question. He slowly walked to his window and replied “the ravines in Iceland are deep” and it was at that point that I realized I was an enginee…

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Re: Tell HN: I am going to host "Real Analysis" book club meetings

#32

Post by koskanaiken »

ww520 wrote: post #16

Excellent idea. Real Analysis was the hardest course I took back in college. Too bad I've lost the book over the years. It's an old edition.

Just curious, did you take other higher level math classes (complex analysis, topology, etc)? If yes, do you think they are easier?

Re: Tell HN: I am going to host "Real Analysis" book club meetings

#35

Post by Gabriel54 »

impendia wrote: post #30
zeitgeistcowboy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a CS undergrad at MIT and took the fancy math people’s analysis class for a math requirement and they used Rudin and it killed me. We went through like 170 pages of it for one semester. The professor was Sigurdur Helgason. I went into office hours one day and ask him a question. He slowly walked to his window and replied “the ravines in Iceland are deep” and it was at that point that I realized I was an enginee…

Lol. Did you figure out what that was supposed to mean?

Not the OP but as a mathematician I can say this, if you study analysis and start to ask questions about why or how certain things work, you will quickly fall deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole until you reach the basic axioms. In analysis the distance between these axioms and what people use analysis for on a daily basis can be quite large.

Re: Tell HN: I am going to host "Real Analysis" book club meetings

#40

Post by crystal_revenge »

koskanaiken wrote: post #32
ww520 wrote: post #16

Excellent idea. Real Analysis was the hardest course I took back in college. Too bad I've lost the book over the years. It's an old edition.

Just curious, did you take other higher level math classes (complex analysis, topology, etc)? If yes, do you think they are easier?

I suspect, for a lot of math students, Real Analysis is the first introduction to "real math" and is frequently taught assuming such. I found, at least in undergrad, that a fair bit of students that think they are "good at math" are really "good at calculation" and Real Analysis is quite a shock for anyone coming from that perspective.

It's unfortunate that many students studying math more causally or as a prerequisite for other fields don't get a chance to study Real Analysis because, in addition to this difficulty (from lack of exposure), it's also a great introduction to the beauty of mathematics.

I'm about as far as one can get from a practicing mathematician, but I still find myself pulling out the baby Rudin from time to time just for the pure pleasure of wandering through it.

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