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    Remarks On Expository Writing in Mathematics: Robert B. Ash

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    hahaggerg
    1) Textbooks are an important part of graduate students learning advanced mathematics, but existing textbooks often have gaps, are difficult to read linearly, or assume too much prior knowledge. 2) For textbooks to be more readable, they should adopt a linear style with solutions to exercises, discuss intuitive explanations for results, replace abstract arguments with algorithms when possible, use concrete examples, and avoid serious gaps in reasoning steps. 3) Improving expository writing in mathematics textbooks would help more students learn advanced topics, and mathematicians should be rewarded for focusing on clear teaching and writing to develop the field.

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    Remarks On Expository Writing in Mathematics: Robert B. Ash

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    hahaggerg
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    1) Textbooks are an important part of graduate students learning advanced mathematics, but existing textbooks often have gaps, are difficult to read linearly, or assume too much prior knowledge. 2) For textbooks to be more readable, they should adopt a linear style with solutions to exercises, discuss intuitive explanations for results, replace abstract arguments with algorithms when possible, use concrete examples, and avoid serious gaps in reasoning steps. 3) Improving expository writing in mathematics textbooks would help more students learn advanced topics, and mathematicians should be rewarded for focusing on clear teaching and writing to develop the field.

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    1) Textbooks are an important part of graduate students learning advanced mathematics, but existing textbooks often have gaps, are difficult to read linearly, or assume too much prior knowledge. 2) For textbooks to be more readable, they should adopt a linear style with solutions to exercises, discuss intuitive explanations for results, replace abstract arguments with algorithms when possible, use concrete examples, and avoid serious gaps in reasoning steps. 3) Improving expository writing in mathematics textbooks would help more students learn advanced topics, and mathematicians should be rewarded for focusing on clear teaching and writing to develop the field.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    41 views3 pages

    Remarks On Expository Writing in Mathematics: Robert B. Ash

    Uploaded by

    hahaggerg
    1) Textbooks are an important part of graduate students learning advanced mathematics, but existing textbooks often have gaps, are difficult to read linearly, or assume too much prior knowledge. 2) For textbooks to be more readable, they should adopt a linear style with solutions to exercises, discuss intuitive explanations for results, replace abstract arguments with algorithms when possible, use concrete examples, and avoid serious gaps in reasoning steps. 3) Improving expository writing in mathematics textbooks would help more students learn advanced topics, and mathematicians should be rewarded for focusing on clear teaching and writing to develop the field.

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    Remarks on Expository Writing in Mathematics

    Robert B. Ash
    Successful graduate students in mathematics are able to reach an advanced level in one or more areas. Textbooks are an important part of this process. A skilled lecturer is able to illuminate and clarify many ideas, but if the pace of a course is fast enough to allow decent coverage, gaps will inevitably result. Students will depend on the text to ll these gaps, but the experience of most students is that the usual text is dicult for the novice to read. At one extreme, the text is a thousand page, twenty pound encyclopedia which cannot be read linearly in a nite amount of time. At the other extreme, the presentation in the book is essentially a seminar lecture with huge gaps. So it seems that improvements in readability of textbooks would be highly desirable, and the natural question is What makes a text readable? Is it possible to answer such a question concretely? I am going to try. First, we need to be clear on exactly who is trying to read these books. Textbooks that are opaque for students may turn out to be quite useful to the research specialist. I will assume that the reader of the text is not already an expert in the area. The path to readability is certainly not unique, but here is some advice that may be useful. 1. Adopt a Linear Style The idea is to help the student move from point A to point B as quickly and eciently as possible. When learning a subject, I dont like lengthy detours, digressions or interruptions. I dont like having my path blocked by exercises that are used in the text but are not accompanied by solutions. It is ne to say that the reader should be challenged to participate actively in the learning process, but if I have to do 100 exercises to get through Chapter 1, and I get stuck on exercise 3, the chances are that I will abandon the project. This leads naturally to the next category. 1

    2 2. Include Solutions to Exercises There is an enormous increase in content when solutions are included. I trust my readers to decide which barriers they will attempt to leap over and which obstacles they will walk around. This often invites the objection that I am spoon-feeding my readers. My reply is that I would love to be spoon-fed class eld theory, if only it were possible. Abstract mathematics is dicult enough without introducing gratuitous roadblocks. 3. Discuss the Intuitive Content of Results A formal proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus should be accompanied by some intuition: If x changes by a small amount dx, then the area under the curve y = f (x) changes by dA = f (x) dx, hence dA/dx = f (x). Engineers and physicists will appreciate this viewpoint. They are trying to explain and predict the behavior of physical systems. This is a legitimate use of mathematics, and for this purpose, a formal proof may very well be unnecessary or even counterproductive. Here is an example at a more advanced level. If X = Spec A is the set of all prime ideals of the commutative ring A, topologized with the Zariski topology, it is useful to think informally of the elements f A as functions on X. The value of f at the point P is the coset f + P A/P . Thus f (P ) = 0 i f P . This suggests an abstract analog of the zero set of a collection of polynomials. For any subset S of A, we dene V (S) = {P Spec A : P S}. In other words, V (S) consists of all P X such that every f S vanishes at P . 4. Replace Abstract Arguments by Algorithmic Procedures if Possible One formal proof that a countable union of countable sets An is countable goes like this. Let fn be a surjective mapping of the positive integers N onto An . If we dene h : N N An by h(n, m) = fn (m), then h is surjective and therefore the union n=1 of the An is countable (because N N is countable). But a proof that actually gives an algorithm has more impact. List the sets An as an array: A1 : a11 a12 a13 A2 : a21 a22 a23 A3 : a31 a32 a33 . . . Then count the union by Cantors diagonal method, for example, a11 , a12 , a21 , a13 , a22 , a31 , a14 , a23 , a32 , a41 , and so on. 5. Use the Concrete Example with All the Features of the General Case. Consider the Euclidean algorithm and its corollary that if d is the greatest common divisor of a and b, there exist integers s and t such that sa + tb = d. I like to take a numerical example such as a = 123 and b = 54 and carry out all the details. In this case, a carefully chosen example will have all the features of the general case. What this means is that a formal proof essentially involves substituting Greek letters for numbers. The concrete example instructs you on how to write a formal proof, and is easier to follow.

    3 6. Avoid Serious Gaps in the Reasoning This may be the most important component of readability. Nothing wears out the reader more than a proof in which step n+1 does not follow from step n. If the conclusions are not justied by the arguments given, the student trying to learn the subject is in for a rough ride. Gaps can take several forms. An algebraic computation may be dicult to follow because not enough details are provided. A result from a later chapter can be tacitly assumed. Knowledge of a subject not covered in the text might be required. But perhaps the most common gap occurs when steps that are essential for understanding the proof are simply omitted. One can argue that it may be dicult to determine how much detail to give. After all, we are not going to write proofs in the formal language of set theory. We are not going to expand the text to ten thousand pages. We want the steps in a proof to be as clear as possible, and at the same we want the argument to be as brief as possible. My job as expositor is to resolve the conict between these two objectives. If I go too far in one direction or the other, my readers will let me know about it. Closing Comments I hope to see a change in the reward structure and system of values at research-oriented universities so that teaching and expository writing become legitimate as a specialty. This will help to improve the current situation in which many advanced areas of mathematics are inaccessible to most students because no satisfactory exposition exists. I hope to see more mathematicians write lecture notes for their courses and post the results on the web for all to use.

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