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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 r
by impendia 2y ago
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.
- gsinclair 2y agoSomething more talky is Real Analysis by Jay Cummings. Great book!
- oglop 2y agoI love Bartle’s Real Analysis myself. Little history each chapter on a figure who impacted the specific topic and good explanations. Not sure how it compares to Rudin though.
- zeitgeistcowboy 2y agoI 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 engineer and not a mathematician.
- impendia 2y agoLol. Did you figure out what that was supposed to mean?
- Gabriel54 2y agoNot 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.
- ilovecrows 2y ago[flagged]