

Practical Foundations of Mathematics - neovive
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pt/Practical_Foundations/html/

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IvoDankolov

      "Even now, mathematics students are expected to learn complicated (e- d)-proofs in analysis with no help in understanding the logical structure of the arguments. Examiners fully deserve the garbage that they get in return."
    

Oh yes, speaking from personal experience, calculus professors are so guilty
of that one - "oh, don't worry that you don't know formal logic, use your
intuition", "let's fix our _delta_ to be _epsilon_ / ( 2 * (b-a) ). Don't
worry, it will work out".

And more generally, many of the academics I know seem to be underestimating
the inferential distance to their students not by one, but by a dozen or so
degrees. And then they're surprised that 75% of the would-be computer
scientists with questionable interest in formal mathematics fail. Surprised!

It's certainly not the only fallacy going around, but it can be surprisingly
pervasive.

As for the book. I've only read a very small part of it, but if it does turn
out to be a comprehensible description of the basics of mathematics - well,
it's something that would benefit a lot of people if it gained mainstream
attention.

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sb
tl;dr: Haven't read it but it's on top of my to-read stack. A slightly better
version from the author's home page:

<http://www.paultaylor.eu/~pt/prafm/>

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jerf
Firefox didn't pick up the proper encoding for the pages; it looks to be
closer to MacRoman than anything else (View -> Character Encoding -> More
Encodings -> West European -> Western (MacRoman)), but that's still leaving
bizarre symbols in some places.

~~~
rplacd
It's also leaving La/TeX detritus around, which is pretty annoying. Eqn
environments aren't converted properly, diagrams are dropped altogether, some
manual linebreaks are left in.

Luckily enough sect 1.4 isn't too mangled.

