![]() ![]() He will often give a provisional definition of a tough concept to aid understanding first, but importantly and in contrast to more “accessible” math books, he signals very clearly that he is being intentionally imprecise. And if any book may convince you that the people who say “math is beautiful” aren’t nuts, it’s this one.Spivak manages to deliver both an intuitive picture of a concept and the full mathematical rigor in a brilliant and playful style. Even if you aren’t a math for math’s sake sort of person, it is always worthy of attention when an expert like Spivak explains what their world is like with such clarity and passion. ![]() Calculus–a dry, boring, and mechanical subject for most other authors–is here presented as a beautiful and interesting intellectual achievement worthy of study on its own right. ⭐The prose in this book is perhaps the best writing on a technical subject I have ever seen. The book is also limited to single variable calculus, so is more of a rigorous introduction. If one buys the book, definitely purchase the companion answer book, as that often makes the process of reasoning much more clear. The problems are more complicated and thought provoking than Stewart’s text, but examples outside pure math are often lacking. There are sometimes simpler and equally rigorous proofs available from other sources. Some of the proofs are beautiful and clear, but some of the examples are needlessly complex and confusing (like the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 3 or the Schwartz inequality). ⭐This is as much a real analysis as calculus text. Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website: ![]()
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