Lectures on real analysis (Q2898732)

This booklet provides a concise introduction to the theory of functions of one real variable, suitable for a one-semester course in basic real analysis at the undergraduate level. As the author points out in the preface, these lectures are based on his experience of teaching this foundational material many times for second-year students in Australia and Canada, in particular with the emphatic intention to treat the subject in a brisk, succinct, rigorous and reasonably complete manner, thereby helping students focus on the essentials, on the one hand, and demonstrating how to practise reading and writing mathematical proofs on the other. In fact, the emphasis of the author's exposition is on rigorous concepts and arguments in basic real analysis, and not at all on example- driven visualization, graphical figures, or intuitive depictions. Indeed, there is not a single illustrating picture in the entire book -- just as it used to be in Edmund Landau's (in)famous (and still unrivalled) primers on analysis and number theory!NEWLINENEWLINE As for the precise contents, the booklet comprises ten short chapters, each of which is divided into several brief sections.NEWLINENEWLINE Chapter 1 contains the necessary elementary material on natural numbers, integers, rational numbers, set operations, and mappings between sets. Chapter 2 introduces the complete ordered field of real numbers axiomatically, together with its Archimedean property, the density of the set of irrational numbers, and the uncountability of \(\mathbb{R}\). Chapter 3 discusses sequences and series of real numbers, including the notion of convergence, limits, monotone sequences, and Cauchy sequences. Chapter 4 explains the underlying topological concepts, in particular open, closed, and compact subsets of \(\mathbb{R}\), while Chapter 5 is devoted to the notion of continuity for real functions, with special regard to continuous functions on compact sets and intervals, monotone functions, and limits of functions.NEWLINENEWLINE Differentiable functions and their basic properties are treated in Chapter 6, which is followed by an introduction to the Riemann integral, the fundamental theorem of calculus, the natural logarithm function, and the exponential function in the subsequent Chapter 7. The main topic of Chapter 8 is sequences and series of real functions, including pointwise and uniform convergence, power series, Taylor series, and a rigorous treatment of the standard trigonometric functions and their inverses as an instructive application of the whole framework developed so far. ln the context of the zeros of the sine function, the notion of group is introduced, and the closed subgroups of \((\mathbb{R},+)\) are described as an instructive aside. From this, the structure of the period group of both the sine and the cosine function is derived, thereby demonstrating the use of a little group theory in real analysis. Chapter 9 gives an example-based introduction to metric spaces in general, emphasizing the generalization of several notions from the space \(\mathbb{R}\) to abstract metric spaces. Along the way, it is pointed out how much of the theory developed in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 can be extended to general (complete) metric spaces. The final Chapter 10 presents the contraction principle (or the Banach fixed point theorem, respectively) for self-maps of complete metric spaces. As an important application, Picard's theorem on the existence and uniqueness of solutions to certain initial value problems in the theory of first-order ordinary differential equations is proved.NEWLINENEWLINE Each chapter ends with a series of related exercises, many of which provide additional results and examples to the respective topics. Apart from further exercises scattered throughout the text, there is also an abundance of illustrating examples and instructive remarks. All together, this booklet represents a rather concise, but nevertheless highly effective and very lucid introduction to the subject, mainly through the author's individual composition of the material and his expository skills.