The foundations of mathematics

by Ian Stewart, David Orme Tall

The Foundations of Mathematics

Genres: Mathematics, Nonfiction, Science, Academic, Philosophy

263 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Ian Nicholas Stewart is an Emeritus Professor and Digital Media Fellow in the Mathematics Department at Warwick University, with special responsibility for public awareness of mathematics and science. He is best known for his popular science writing on mathematical themes.
--from the author's website

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See other authors with similar names.

Reviews

[Rida Hamadani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a high school freshman when I read this book, it is excellent!
I struggled as the pace of formalization of concepts accelerated, but with reading repetition, I grasped the wonderful ideas.
It is for those people who are very excited about pure mathematics, and can’t help but ask abstract questions all the time, such as “what is a number?”.
Probably the introduction to formal mathematics!

[Erickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and detailed in the proofs and explanations. However, for my standard, I need to read it again to gain fuller understanding. That's how I see this book.

[Westin Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did Not Finish after 70 or so pages. This was not beginner-friendly or easy to follow as advertised. It takes things slow for the first 10 pages or so, then cranks out non-stop math and notation in a cramped format that is difficult to read. You definitely need to already be familiar with this kind of material beforehand. The math should have used much simpler examples and spaced things out more. As for the writing, it overexplained the obvious and underexplained the hard stuff. And the prose itself was just not very good or clear outside of the introduction sections.

Maybe I'm just dumb at math, but even if I were a math student, I think I'd find this book to be of limited use, as I'd probably would have learned these concepts more intuitively from a teacher.

[Indee3 · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really struggled to read this book. I understood maybe 20-30% of it. I often found that using additional things suh as youtube videos and wikipedia helped me to understand concepts but to me that defeats the purpose of having a single textbook to learn these ideas and i didnt always have intermet acess.

As someone who is a total begginer to university level maths I didnt think this book was of great benefit, im going to try some online moocs and other books whoch cover the same topics and when I do ill make sure to link/review them

[Lewis Waite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heavy but was my sole source of prep for University level Maths

[Burke Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valuable Brit views

[Fred Fidsol · Rating 3 out of 5]

ok

[Eleni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very challenging.... But useful still. Should've really done the exercises at the end of each chapter though