ABSTRACT
In the next three chapters of the book — this one and the next two — I want to introduce you to a topic with a different flavour from the rest of the book. This is a topic called mathematical analysis, or just analysis for short. This is a huge area, which at an undergraduate level starts off with the study of the real and complex numbers, and functions defined on them. Of course we can’t cover very much of the subject — that would require several more books — but we will do enough to prove several interesting results, such as putting the existence of decimal expressions for real numbers on a rigorous footing, and proving the existence of n th roots of positive real numbers (stated in Proposition 4.1).
