What I Learned by Teaching Real Analysis
What I Learned by Teaching Real Analysis
What I Learned by Teaching Real Analysis
http://www.maa.org/features/whatilearnedgouvea.html
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10/17/2011 4:56 AM
http://www.maa.org/features/whatilearnedgouvea.html
OK, so we launch into the course itself. Before we start, it is useful to ask what we want to achieve. The first answer comes easily: we want to introduce students to epsilon-delta proofs, and to use this technique to prove all those theorems they took for granted in their calculus course. But the answer generates questions of its own. Why do this? What do students gain from such knowledge? Thats easy to answer if your students are likely to be going to graduate school. But most of my students are not, at least not immediately or not in mathematics. (A vast majority of Colby students do end up getting an advanced degree, but thats different from going on to get a Ph.D. in mathematics.) So the question becomes a little sharper. I decided to take it for granted that my students wanted to learn mathematics, irrespective of their future career plans. The sharper question is, then, are epsilon-delta proofs a crucial thing for them to learn, and, if so, why? Now, its easy to mount an argument that learning this stuff is in fact not that important. After all, lots of people learn and use sophisticated mathematics without ever having felt the need to delve into the foundations of the calculus. Convergence questions can usually be settled by this gets small, and thats even smaller arguments. Turning those into formal epsilon-delta arguments is a nice party trick, and one that professional mathematicians have to know how to do, but no one should get too excited about it. As a counter to that, lets note that some of my students were planning to go to graduate school, and they would need to know the trick. And the course is there in the curriculum, and listed as required. So it must be important after all. This makes it clear that in order to justify the formalism of real analysis, one needs to find situations and problems in which the epsilon-delta approach is essential. There is, of course, a very famous moment (by no means the only such moment, but probably the best known) in the history of mathematics that serves as an example: Cauchys proof that the sum of a series of continuous functions is continuous. As presented by Cauchy, this is a classic this is small, and so is this argument. And, of course, it doesnt work, because hidden in the argument is a uniformity assumption. I decided to use this example (or a simplified version of it) fairly early on. Abbotts book turned out to be a good fit, because the author was clearly worried about similar issues. Each of his chapters begins with an example where things go wrong in ways that can only be understood by using the formal tools of analysis. Some of these are more convincing than others, but I was delighted to be using a textbook that noticed that such examples are crucial to the course. One of the main threads in the course, then, was the idea of uniformity. The very definitions of uniform continuity and uniform convergence require the epsilon-delta formalism, and the notions simply cannot be understood without it. Over and over, I showed students examples of things that went wrong because something failed to be uniform, and showed them how to fix it by adding the uniformity assumption. To this, I added two other threads, both stolen from articles written by wiser mathematicians than me. The first was the problem of partitioning the real numbers into two disjoint sets A and B, and then finding two functions f and g where f is continuous on A and discontinuous on B, and g does the reverse. The easiest case is when A is a singleton set (well, A empty is even easier, I guess), and students are usually able to push that a little. The case A = Q is the clincher: in this case the function g exists, but not the function f (i.e., no function can be continuous at all rational points and discontinuous at all the irrationals). This follows from a beautiful (and fairly easy) theorem of Volterra that William Dunham wrote up in an article for Mathematics Magazine some years ago. (The precise reference is given below.) This thread doesnt really connect to the issue of uniformity, but it fits in well with the point set topology. I also like it because it shows that not every kind of monster exists. What I mean is this: when students first start learning point set topology, they get a feeling that things can get arbitrarily pathological, that anything can be done. Cantor sets and similar objects tend to reinforce that feeling. Volterras theorem, however, shows that in fact not everything can be done, and it does it without having to introduce something like Baire category theory. The second added thread is the problem of constructing a nice function that interpolates the factorials. In other words, I posed to students the question of how one should define x! when x is not an integer. David Fowler wrote a series of articles for the Mathematical Gazette on this topic, and I stole his ideas without remorse. For example, its easy to construct a continuous function that does the trick: define x! to be 1 if x is between 0 and 1, and then extend it by using the functional equation x! = x(x-1)!. Unfortunately, the resulting function fails to be differentiable. Finding the simplest way to define x! on [0,1] so that the extended function is differentiable is a nice exercise. Eventually, of course, we ended up with the Gamma function (on the reals). To do that, we had to deal with improper integrals depending on a parameter. (Unfortunately, Abbott doesnt cover improper integrals and integrals depending on a parameter, so I had to fish this part out from other
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http://www.maa.org/features/whatilearnedgouvea.html
texts.) The nice thing is that for most properties of the Gamma function (continuity, differentiability, etc.) we had to deal with issues of uniformity again, neatly closing the circle. In fact, as long as the convergence is uniform came up so often in the last few classes that it became clear to me that this was the core concept I was teaching. What did my students learn? By the end of the semester they certainly had a good enough understanding of uniform convergence and of the techniques used to understand and prove things related to it. I dont know that that understanding will last very long unless it is reinforced in other courses. But they did understand, I think, that the difficult formalism of analysis is there for a reason, and that it is needed if we are to do interesting things with functions. I dont think theyll forget that. And thats good enough for me. References: A Historical Gem from Vito Volterra, by William Dunham. Mathematics Magazine, 63 (1990), pp. 234237. A Simple Approach to the Factorial Function, by David Fowler. Mathematical Gazette, 80 (1996), 378380. A Simple Approach to the Factorial Function the next step, by David Fowler. Mathematical Gazette, 83 (1999), 5357.
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