314 – Foundations of Analysis – Syllabus

Math 314: Foundations of Analysis.

Andrés E. Caicedo.
Contact Information: See here.
Time: TTh 12:00 – 1:15 pm.
Place: Mathematics Building, Room 139.
Office Hours: Th, 1:30 – 3:00 pm, or by appointment. (If you need an appointment, email me a few times/dates that may work for you, and I’ll get back to you).

Textbook: Stephen Abbott. Understanding Analysis. Springer-Verlag, Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics, 2001; 257 pp. ISBN-10: 0387950605. ISBN-13: 978-0387950600.

Here is the publisher’s page. Additional information is available from the author’s page. Review (MR1807438 (2001m:26001)) by Robert Gardner Bartle at MathSciNet. Review by Jeffrey Nunemacher at the American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 118, No. 2 (February 2011), pp. 186-189.

I will mention additional references, and provide handouts of additional material, as needed.

Contents: The department’s course description reads:

The real number system, completeness and compactness, sequences, continuity, foundations of the calculus.

I strongly suggest you read the material ahead of our meetings, and work on it frequently. You may find some of the topics challenging. If so, here is some excellent advice by Faulkner (from an interview at The Paris Review):

Personally, I find the topics we will study beautiful, and I hope you enjoy learning it as much as I did.

Please bookmark this post. I update it frequently with detailed week-to-week descriptions.

Detailed day to day description and homework assignments. All problems are from Abbott’s book unless otherwise explicitly specified:

• January 21 – 30. Chapter 1. The real numbers. Irrationality. Completeness. Countable and uncountable sets.
• January 21. Functions. Mathematical induction and the well-ordering principle.
• January 23. Sets, logic, quantifiers. Completeness.
• January 28. Completeness. Countable and uncountable sets. I recommend you read Errol Morris‘s essay on Hypassus of Metapontum, the apparent discoverer of the irrationality of .
• January 30. Comparing infinities. Counting the rationals. I recommend the following two papers on this topic: 1 and 2. Office hours this week will be on Friday, 11:45-1:15.

Homework set 1 (Due February 4). Exercises 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.7, 1.2.8, 1.2.10; 1.3.2 – 1.3.9; 1.4.2 – 1.4.7, 1.4.11 – 1.4.13; 1.5.3, 1.5.4, 1.5.9. See below for the required format.

Solution to 1.2.1.

• February 4 – 20. Chapter 2. Sequences and series. Limits. Cauchy sequences. Infinite series. Riemann‘s rearrangement theorem.
• February 4. Rearrangements of infinite series, limits of sequences. Homework 1 is due today.
• February 6. Limit theorems.
• February 11. Limit theorems continued. Infinite series.
• February 13. Monotone convergence. The Bolzano–Weierstrass theorem.
• February 18. The Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem continued. Absolute and conditional convergence. Cauchy sequences.
• February 20. Riemann’s rearrangement’s theorem, and extensions (see here and here). The interesting paper by Marion Scheepers mentioned on the second of those links can be found here.
• Additional topics: Products of series. Double series.

Homework set 2 (Due February 25). Exercises 2.2.1, 2.2.2, 2.2.5, 2.2.7, 2.3.2, 2.3.3, 2.3.6, 2.3.7, 2.3.9, 2.3.11, 2.4.2, 2.4.4, 2.4.5, 2.5.3, 2.5.4, 2.6.1, 2.6.3, 2.6.5, 2.7.1, 2.7.4, 2.7.6, 2.7.9, 2.7.11. See below for the required format.

• February 25 – March 6. Chapter 3. Basic topological notions: Open sets. Closed, compact, and perfect sets. The Cantor set. Connectedness. The Baire category theorem.
• February 25. The Cantor set. Open and closed sets.
• February 27. Open and closed sets, continued. Extra credit problem: Find a set of reals such that we can obtain different sets by applying to it (any combination of) the operations of complementation and closure. Kuratowski showed that is the largest number that can be obtained that way, you are welcome to also try to show that. (See here.)
• March 4. Open covers, compact sets. Perfect sets. Connectedness.
• March 6. The Baire category theorem.
• Additional topics: The study of closed sets of reals naturally leads to the Cantor-Bendixson derivative, and the Cantor-Baire stationary principle (See here for Ivar Otto Bendixson). A nice reference is Alekos Kechris‘s book, Classical descriptive set theory. For the Baire category theorem and basic applications, I recommend the beginning of John Oxtoby‘s short book, Measure and category. See also the nice paper Subsum Sets: Intervals, Cantor Sets, and Cantorvals by Zbigniew Nitecki, downloadable at the arXiv.

Homework set 3 (Due March 11). Exercises 3.2.1, 3.2.3, 3.2.7, 3.2.9, 3.2.11, 3.2.12, 3.2.14, 3.3.2, 3.3.4 – 3.3.7, 3.3.9, 3.3.10, 3.4.2, 3.4.4, 3.4.5, 3.4.7 – 3.4.10, 3.5.4 – 3.5.6.

Solution to 3.3.6.

• March 11 – March 20. Chapter 4. Limits and continuity: “Continuous” limits. Continuity of functions. The interaction of continuity and compactness.  The intermediate value theorem.
• March 11. The concept of function. Dirichlet‘s and Thomae‘s examples. Definition of limit and basic properties.
• March 13. Properties of limits (continued). Definition of continuity and basic properties.
• March 18. Applications of continuity: The intermediate value property. Banach‘s fixed point theorem.
• March 20.  Continuity and compactness. Uniform continuity. Sets of discontinuity of functions.
• Additional topics: The history of the concept of function is very interesting. The intermediate value property also has a curious history. Apparently, for a while it was expected that it sufficed to characterize continuity. Bolzano’s original paper is fairly accessible. A particularly interesting continuous function is the Cantor function, also called the devil’s staircase. The topic of fixed points (Exercise 4.5.7) leads to a beautiful theorem of Sharkovski, on the possible periods of continuous functions (See here for Oleksandr Mykolaiovych Sharkovsky).

Homework set 4 (Due April 1st). Exercises 4.2.1, 4.2.4, 4.2.6, 4.2.7, 4.3.1, 4.3.3, 4.3.4, 4.3.6, 4.3.8 – 4.3.10, 4.3.12, 4.4.1, 4.4.4, 4.4.6, 4.4.9, 4.4.10, 4.4.13, 4.5.2, 4.5.4, 4.5.7.

• April 1 – April 10. Chapter 5. Derivatives: What is a derivative? Differentiability and continuity. Darboux theorem. The mean value theorem. Nowhere differentiable functions.
• April 1. Sets of discontinuity of functions. Definition of derivative, basic properties. Baire class 1 functions.
• April 3. Darboux theorem (the intermediate value property).
• April 8. Rolle‘s theorem. The mean value theorem. L’Hôpital’s rule (see here for Guillaume de l’Hôpital).
• April 10. Continuous nowhere differentiable functions. Weierstrass function. Proper understanding of this topic requires the notion of uniform convergence, that we will discuss in Chapter 6.
• Supplemental reading: This is a very useful exercise to review the notions of continuity and uniform continuity. For more on the Baire classes of functions, I recommend Kechris’s book on Classical descriptive set theory. The problem of characterizing which functions are derivatives has led to a significant amount of research; these two notes (by Andrew Bruckner, and by Bruckner and J. L. Leonard) discuss some details: 1, 2. On continuous nowhere differentiable functions, the thesis linked to above (by Johan Thim) is a useful resource. Sections 1, 2, 4 of this “quiz” (by Louis A. Talman) complement well the discussion of similar topics in the book. For the history of the mean value theorem, see these slides by Ádám Besenyei.

Homework set 5 (Due April 15). Exercises 5.2.1 – 5.2.5, 5.3.2, 5.3.3, 5.3.5, 5.3.7.

• April 15 – April 24. Chapter six: Sequences and series of functions. Pointwise vs. uniform convergence. Uniform convergence, continuity, and differentiability. Power series, Taylor series, vs. real analytic.
• April 15. Pointwise and uniform convergence of sequences of functions. The uniform limit of a sequence of continuous functions is continuous.
• April 17. Section 6.3: Let be a sequence of differentiable functions defined on a closed interval, that converges pointwise and such that their derivatives converge uniformly. Then the pointwise limit is indeed uniform, the resulting function is differentiable, and its derivative is the limit of the .
• April 22. Series of functions. Weierstrass -test. Power series.
• April 24. Power series (continued). Taylor series. Real analytic functions.
• Supplemental reading: On the topic of analytic vs functions, see these two essays by Dave L. Renfro: 1, 2. The result of section 6.3 is false if we ask that the sequence of functions converges uniformly while their derivatives converge pointwise. Darji in fact proved that we can have the limit of the be a differentiable function whose derivative disagrees everywhere with the limit of the derivatives. See here. On Formal power series and applications in combinatorics, I recommend the nice paper by Ivan Niven on this topic. For more on real analytic functions, see the first two chapters of the book A primer of real analytic functions, by Steven Krantz and Harold Parks.

Homework set 6 (Due April 29). Exercises 6.2.1, 6.2.5, 6.2.8, 6.2.13, 6.2.15, 6.2.16, 6.3.1, 6.3.4, 6.4.1, 6.4.3 – 6.4.6, 6.5.1, 6.5.2, 6.6.1, 6.6.6.

• April 29 – May 8. Chapter seven: The Riemann integral. Darboux’s characterization. Basic properties. The fundamental theorem of calculus. Lebesgue‘s criterion.
• April 29. Darboux’s approach to the Riemann integral in terms of upper and lower sums. Continuous functions are integrable.
• May 1. Basic properties of the integral, integrable discontinuous functions. A theorem on uniform convergence ensuring that the integral of a limit is the limit of the integrals.
• May 6. The fundamental theorem of calculus. Sets of measure zero.
• May 8. Lebesgue’s characterization of Riemann integrable functions.
• Supplemental reading: For the interesting history of the early development of the Riemann integral, I suggest the first two chapters of Lebesgue’s theory of integration, by Thomas Hawkins.

Homework set 7 (Due May 13 at 10:30). Exercises 7.2.2, 7.2.5, 7.2.6, 7.3.1, 7.3.3, 7.3.6, 7.4.2, 7.4.4, 7.4.6, 7.5.1, 7.5.4, 7.5.10.

Group project due May 15 at 10:30.

A multiple-choice quiz, by Vicky Neale.

 

Grading: Based on homework. There will also be a group project, that will count as much as two homework sets. I expect there will be no exams, but if we see the need, you will be informed reasonably in advance.

There is bi-weekly homework, due Tuesdays at the beginning of lecture; you are welcome to turn in your homework early, but I will not accept homework past Tuesdays at 12:05 pm, or grant extensions. The homework covers some routine and some more challenging exercises related to the topics covered in the past two weeks (roughly, one homework set per chapter). It is a good idea to work daily on the homework problems corresponding to the material covered that day.

You are encouraged to work in groups and to ask for help. However, the work you turn in should be written on your own. Give credit as appropriate: Make sure to list all books, websites, and people you collaborated with or consulted while working on the homework. If relevant, indicate what software packages you used, and include any programs you may have written, or additional data.

Your homework must follow the format developed by the mathematics department at Harvey Mudd College. You will find that format at this link. If you do not use this style, unfortunately your homework will be graded as 0. In particular, please make sure that what you turn in is not your scratch work but the final product. Include partial attempts whenever you do not have a full solution.

I may ask you to meet with me to discuss details of sets, and I suggest that before you turn in your work, you make a copy of it, so you can consult it if needed.

I post links to supplementary material on Google+. Circle me and let me know if you are interested, and I’ll add you to my Analysis circle.

Twitter.

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403/503 – Advanced linear algebra – Syllabus

Math 403/503: Advanced linear algebra.

Andrés E. Caicedo.
Contact Information: See here.
Time: TTh 10:30 – 11:45 am.
Place: Mathematics Building, Room 124.
Office Hours: Th, 1:30 – 3:00 pm, or by appointment. (If you need an appointment, email me a few times/dates that may work for you, and I’ll get back to you).

Textbook: Although it is not a textbook per se, our main reference will be

• Jiří Matoušek. Thirty-three Miniatures: Mathematical and Algorithmic Applications of Linear Algebra. American Mathematical Society, Student Mathematical Library, vol. 53, 2010; 182 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8218-4977-8. ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-4977-4.

Here is the publisher’s page. A preliminary version is available from the author’s page. Review (MR2656313 (2011f:15002)) by Torsten Sander at MathSciNet.

Another useful reference in the same spirit is

• László Babai, and Péter Frankl. Linear Algebra Methods in Combinatorics. With Applications to Geometry and Computer Science. Preliminary Version 2 (September 1992), 216 pages.

This book is unpublished. A copy can be obtained from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, or elsewhere. There are also several sets of lecture notes on this topic available online. See for example here or here.

We will not restrict our lectures to topics related to these applications, and also cover some more traditional material, and some numerical aspects of the theory. A pdf of Uwe Kaiser‘s notes can be found here and the TeX source here. I will provide handouts of additional material as needed.

Contents: The department’s course description reads:

Concepts of linear algebra from a theoretical perspective. Topics include vector spaces and linear maps, dual vector spaces and quotient spaces, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, diagonalization, inner product spaces, adjoint transformations, orthogonal and unitary transformations, Jordan normal form.

The way we will develop the theory is by studying examples of some of its typical applications, and then covering the topics needed to understand these examples.

Please bookmark this post. I update it frequently with detailed week-to-week descriptions.

Detailed day to day description and homework assignments:

• January 21. Review of basic linear algebra: Vector spaces, fields. On “field” vs “body”, see here.
• January 23. Linear transformations, matrices, bases. Quick overview of topics. Solving linear recurrences (Matoušek’s lectures 1 and 2).
• January 28. Recurrent sequences. A useful reference (unfortunately in Spanish): Sucesiones recurrentes, by A. I. Markushevich. The goal is to use these results to motivate the study of the Jordan canonical form. Office hours this week will be on Friday, 11:45-1:15.
• January 30. Recurrent sequences. Diagonalizable and non-diagonalizable matrices.
• February 4. Ideals. Minimal polynomials. Homework 1, due February 18.
• February 6. Jordan blocks. Recurrent sequences.
• February 11. The Jordan form theorem.
• February 13. Odds and ends. Other possible approaches to solving linear recurrences. (We will revisit generalized eigenspaces, direct sums, and the Jordan form theorem later on.) Next topic: Parity (including Matoušek’s lectures 3, 4, 17).
• February 18. Parity. Oddtown. (Matoušek’s lecture 3).
• February 20. The Eventown theorem. Bilinear forms, inner products, isotropic vectors, singular spaces. (Section 2.3 in the Babai-Frankl notes.)
• February 25. Singular spaces (continued).
• February 27. The Berlekamp-Graver strong Eventown theorem.
• March 4. The generalized Fisher inequality and additional results on set systems with forbidden intersections (Matoušek’s lecture 4). Finite projective planes. Homework 2, due March 18. Next topic: Finding eigenvalues.
• March 6. Finite projective planes (continued). Isbell’s theorem.
• March 11. Isbell’s theorem (continued). Matoušek’s lecture 17.
• March 13. Wilkinson’s polynomial, Geršgorin’s circles theorem.
• March 18. Geršgorin’s theorem (continued), Lévy’s theorem.
• March 20. Taussky’s extension of Lévy’s theorem, irreducible matrices, strongly connected graphs.
• March 22–30. Spring break. See here for some references on Geršgorin’s theorem, and an opportunity for extra credit, due April 8.
• April 1. The equivalence of irreducibility and strong connectedness. Ostrowski’s theorem.
• April 3. Orthogonal matrices have real eigenvalues. The power method for computing eigenvalues.
• April 8. Orthogonal matrices are diagonalizable. Francis’s QR algorithm.
• April 10. Francis’s algorithm, continued.
• April 15. Reflectors. Francis’s algorithm (conclusion). Homework 3, due May 8.
• April 17. Geometric approach to determinants.
• April 22. Weierstrass axiomatization.
• April 24. Determinants (continued). Vandermonde determinant.
• April 29. Vandermonde determinant (continued). Matoušek’s lecture 21.
• May 1. Matoušek’s lecture 21 (continued). Algebraic graph theory. Homework 4, due May 15.

I expect to complete a draft of a set of notes based on our lectures during the Summer. Contact me if you are interested in a copy.

Grading: Based on homework. No extensions will be granted, and no late work will be accepted. I expect there will be no exams, but if we see the need, you will be informed reasonably in advance. You are encouraged to work in groups and to ask for help. However, the work you turn in should be written on your own. Give credit as appropriate: Make sure to list all books, websites, and people you collaborated with or consulted while working on the homework. If relevant, indicate what software packages you used, and include any programs you may have written, or additional data.

I may ask you to meet with me to discuss details of sets, and I suggest that before you turn in your work, you make a copy of it, so you can consult it if needed.

I post links to supplementary material on Google+. Circle me and let me know if you are interested, and I’ll add you to my Linear Algebra circle.

Twitter.