Derivations

My goal in this site is to develop a rigorous acccount of undergraduate math concepts, following four fundamental principles:

  1. No magic lemmas. Theorems should be broken down into steps that are motivated, that actually seem like a step towards the goal, before those steps are proved. e.g. don't prove Rolle's theorem until after you can explain what that has to do with Taylor polynomials.
  2. No magic formulas. Before you even state the goal of a theorem or lemma, the individual operations and formulas should themselves have emerged naturally in the course of proving earlier theorems. e.g. don't even state Taylor's theorem as a goal until you can explain why Taylor polynomials are interesting and useful all on their own.
  3. Respect common language. If academic language would allow a set to be both open and closed, or for continuous functions to have jumps, then academic language is wrong, not common language.
  4. Emphasize computation and real-world inference. Differential and integral calculus are used by real people to infer real facts about the world every day; a rigorous account of mathematics should rigorously explain why that is possible, not just why some theorems follow from some arbitrary choice of axioms.

I have worked out lots of ideas and sketches following these principles, but I haven't written many of them up. See jarviscarroll.net/projects/derivations.html for more information about this and related projects.

Linear Algebra

Geometric Algebra

Rotors from Determinants, covers:

Calculus

Analysis

Abstract Algebra

Type Theory

Foundations

Philosophy