Sets, Functions, and Logic |  | Author: Keith Devlin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Category: EBooks
List Price: $54.95
Buy New: $39.56
You Save: $15.39 (28%)
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 62164
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 2nd
Pages: 147
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 510
Publication Date: March 14, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Since its first edition published in 1981, Set, Function and Logic has smoothed the road to higher mathematics for legions of undergraduate students. Now in its third edition, the author--a leading popularizer of mathematics -- has fully revised his text to reflect a new generation. The narrative is more lively, less textbook-like. Remarks and asides link the various topics to the real world. The chapter on complex numbers and discussion of formal symbolic logic is gone in favor of a new introductory chapter on the nature of mathematics and more exercises. The result is an affordable, thoroughly engaging book that every student making the transition from calculus to higher mathematics will welcome.
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| Customer Reviews:
 logic and mathematics January 20, 1999
5 out of 19 found this review helpful
This book is good for concise information, but is very pricey for its contents. My advice is find a better book.
 Breezy Pop-Math, Bad Historian April 24, 2008
Trip Like I Do (USA)
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
Much more badder than the Bad Lieutenant is the Bad Historian - one who paints with a broad and messy brush using the wrong kind of paint. This is a book that looks good on cursory browsing but then you meet up with assertions such as "This innovation marked the birth of the theorem, now the bedrock of mathematics. [okay...] For the Greeks, this approach culminated in the publication of Euclid's Elements, reputedly the most widely circulated book of all time after the Bible. [hmm, okay...] There was no major change in the overall nature of mathematics [uhh...] and hardly any significant advances within the subject, until the middle of the 17th Century, [lol...what??] when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently invented Calculus. In essence, calculus is the study of continuous motion and change. [oh, duh]"
Well, so much for Diophantus, Viete, Harriot, Descartes, the complete symbolization of algebra, and the ascension of analytic geometry.
The writing in this book is much in the same way elsewhere, where everything carries on quite topically in a light-hearted Trivial-Pursuits sort of fashion until the author suddenly renders some supremely unfounded or blatantly amateur general conclusion about mathematics suggestive of lack of scholarship and certainly a lack of depth of understanding.
Some authors produce one major work in their lifetime that changes the course of human thought. Newton is one obvious example, and Dedekind one less obvious example. Other attention-seeking authors inundate the field with multiple, lesser, flawed and derivative works, that ultimately amount to nothing. Consider the piles of voluminous but haphazardly-written computer programming books that now litter the landfills. And then consider this book amongst them.
"The second fundamental question about mathematics -- "What does it do for us?" -- can also be answered with a catchy phrase: Mathematics makes the invisible visible!"
Oh, Yay!
"It was only in the 1980s that a definition of mathematics emerged on which most mathematicians now agree: mathematics is the science of patterns!"
A science of patterns! Oh, yay! Yay! It's all clear now! Lol. Perhaps purchase a used copy if only to read it as an impulsive pseudohistory or a self-parody.
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