At the heart of this short introduction to category theory is the idea of a universal property, important throughout mathematics. After an introductory chapter giving the basic definitions, separate chapters explain three ways of expressing universal properties: via adjoint functors, representable functors, and limits. A final chapter ties all three together. The book is suitable for use in courses or for independent study. Assuming relatively little mathematical background, it is ideal fo...

Lewis Carroll's books have delighted children and adults for generations, but behind their exuberant fantasy and delightful nonsense was the mind of a brilliant mathematician.Now his forgotten achievements in the world of numbers are brought to light by acclaimed author and mathematician Robin Wilson. Here he explores the curious imagination of a man whose pioneering work at Oxford University included investigations into voting patterns and tennis seeding, who dreamt up numerical c...

Logic is often perceived as having little to do with the rest of philosophy, and even less to do with real life. In this lively and accessible introduction, Graham Priest shows how wrong this conception is. He explores the philosophical roots of the subject, explaining how modern formal logic deals with issues ranging from the existence of God and the reality of time to paradoxes of probability and decision theory. Along the way, the basics of formal logic are explained in simple, non-tech...

'A wealth of examples to which solutions are given permeate the text so the reader will certainly be active.'The Mathematical GazetteThis is the final book written by the late great puzzle master and logician, Dr. Raymond Smullyan.This book is a sequel to my Beginner's Guide to Mathematical Logic.The previous volume deals with elements of propositional and first-order logic, contains a bit on formal systems and recursion, and concludes with chapters on Gödel's famous incomp...

Gödel's incompleteness theorem is a foundational result in mathematics that proves that any axiomatic theory of numbers will be either inconsistent or incomplete. Turing’s Halting problem is a foundational result in computing proving that computers cannot know if a program will halt. Gödel’s Mistake connects these theorems to the question of meaning. The book shows that the proofs arise due to category confusions between names, concepts, things, programs, algorithms, proble...

Set theory is a rich and beautiful subject whose fundamental concepts permeate virtually every branch of mathematics. One could say that set theory is a unifying theory for mathematics, since nearly all mathematical concepts and results can be formalized within set theory. This textbook is meant for an upper undergraduate course in set theory. In this text, the fundamentals of abstract sets, including relations, functions, the natural numbers, order, cardinality, transfinite recursion, the...

This is a rigorous introduction to real analysis for undergraduate students, starting from the axioms for a complete ordered field and a little set theory. The book avoids any preconceptions about the real numbers and takes them to be nothing but the elements of a complete ordered field. All of the standard topics are included, as well as a proper treatment of the trigonometric functions, which many authors take for granted. The final chapters of the book provide a gentle, example-based in...

This volume takes its name from a popular series of intensive mathematics workshops hosted at institutions in Appalachia and surrounding areas. At these meetings, internationally prominent set theorists give one-day lectures that focus on important new directions, methods, tools and results so that non-experts can begin to master these and incorporate them into their own research. Each chapter in this volume was written by the workshop leaders in collaboration with select student participa...

Few mathematical results capture the imagination like Georg Cantor's groundbreaking work on infinity in the late nineteenth century. This opened the door to an intricate axiomatic theory of sets which was born in the decades that followed. Written for the motivated novice, this book provides an overview of key ideas in set theory, bridging the gap between technical accounts of mathematical foundations and popular accounts of logic. Readers will learn of the formal construction of the class...

Logic, the discipline that explores valid reasoning, does not need to be limited to a specific form of representation but should include any form as long as it allows us to draw sound conclusions from given information. The use of diagrams has a long but unequal history in logic: The golden age of diagrammatic logic of the 19th century thanks to Euler and Venn diagrams was followed by the early 20th century's symbolization of modern logic by Frege and Russell. Recently, we have been witnes...

This second edition of Mathematical Olympiad Treasures contains a stimulating collection of problems in geometry and trigonometry, algebra, number theory, and combinatorics. It encourages readers to think creatively about techniques and strategies for solving real-world problems, with new sections, revisions, and many more Olympiad-like problems at various levels of difficulty.The problems are clustered by topic into three self-contained chapters. The book begins with elem...

This book lays the foundations for an exciting new area of research in descriptive set theory. It develops a robust connection between two active topics: forcing and analytic equivalence relations. This in turn allows the authors to develop a generalization of classical Ramsey theory. Given an analytic equivalence relation on a Polish space, can one find a large subset of the space on which it has a simple form? The book provides many positive and negative general answers to this question....