My recommendation is to focus on these two items and ignore everything else until then: 1) Logical quantifiers: ∃ ("there exists") and ∀ ("for all"). Quantifie

My recommendation is to focus on these two items and ignore everything else until then: 1) Logical quantifiers: ∃ ("there exists") and ∀ ("for all"). Quantifiers can get confusing when they get strung together. I like to think of them as challenge-response games. For example, your real analysis textbook asserts that a function f is continuous at x if ∀ e>0, ∃ d>0 such that if |x0-x|<d, then |f(x0)-f(x)|<e. I think of two players, Ella and Daniel, with the ∀ player (Ella) trying to disprove and the ∃ player (Daniel) trying to prove the statement. Since the definition asserts "∀ e>0", all Ella needs is a single counterexample e' such that no matter what d'>0 Daniel chooses, the condition is false. Or mathematically written, Ella's objective is to prove "∃ e'>0 such that ∀ d'>0, the condition doesn't hold." Notice how taking the converse flips the quantifiers. 2) Set notation: S = { x∈R | 0<x<1 } reads as "S is the set of real numbers that are between 0 and 1". You can also think of this as {x ∈ domain | filter_condition(x,y,z,...)}. You'll see many mathematical objects represented as sets, so it's pretty important to know how sets are defined.