[Sheepish apologies for my too-long absence from blogging. Life!]
My friend and GVSU colleague Ted Sundstrom has recently made his wonderful text, Mathematical Reasoning, free to the public. After being originally published by Prentice Hall in two separate editions and widely adopted, Ted has gotten the copyright given back to him and generously chosen to make the text available for free in .pdf format. See https://sites.google.com/site/mathematicalreasoning3ed/ for a link to download.
At GVSU, we have a very good “bridge/transition” course titled “Communicating in Mathematics,” which serves as our formal introduction to proof-writing, along with giving students some exposure to logic, proof techniques, congruence arithmetic, set theory, induction, and functions and equivalence relations. The class is a prerequisite to all of our upper-level proof-based courses. Along with our colleague Karen Novotny, Ted was instrumental in the development of Communicating in Mathematics, and he wrote this book originally to serve as a textbook for our particular course. Prentice Hall published two editions, many folks at other institutions found his exposition valuable, and the book has been a great success. Personally, I have used the text for more than a decade, and I recommend it most highly. Great exposition, activity-driven, good problems … it’s the whole package.
I’m thrilled that Ted has chosen to move to a Creative Commons license and make the book available for free.
If you wish, you can still purchase the for-profit published version from Amazon. But why would you?
Hi Matt,
Looks like I found your blog. Ted’s book is very nice indeed, and it’s great news that it will be available for free now. I still have my copy in loose-leaf form in a binder. I seem to remember that I had a really great professor for that class 😉 This book was being used at American University before I left there and I will try to use it down here in Ecuador, where ordering already expensive textbooks from the States becomes even more expensive.
Pingback: Active Calculus: now endorsed by the American Institute of Mathematics | opencalculus
Pingback: College textbook prices: up close and personal | opencalculus
Reblogged this on Caroline+Kühn and commented:
Great initiative! Hope I can follow very soon with something worthy