Instead, Bers treated the student as an intelligent being capable of abstraction from day one. It begins with The Real Numbers as a complete ordered field. While Spivak does this too, Bers does it with a sense of urgency. He argues: If you do not know what a number is, you cannot possibly understand what a limit is.
For most modern students, Bers is a footnote; for those who have studied from his text, it is a religious experience. To understand why this PDF (often found in the undercurrents of academic archives) is worth hunting down, one must understand Bers’ radical thesis: 1. The "New Math" Done Right The late 1960s were a turbulent time for math education. The "New Math" movement often failed, drowning children in set theory without teaching arithmetic. Bers, a refugee from Nazi Europe and a student of the great analytical school (he was a protégé of John von Neumann and a colleague of Niels Bohr), rejected the fluffy "intuitive" approach of the time. lipman bers calculus pdf
One of the deepest sections in the PDF is his treatment of . He does not just define the integral as "the area under the curve." He defines it as the limit of a sequence of approximations. He then uses this to solve differential equations long before "Chapter 9." Instead, Bers treated the student as an intelligent