Real Analysis, Lecture 1: Constructing the Rational Numbers
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people recommend Su's lectures for building real analysis intuition, citing his phenomenal teaching style.
What it is
The first lecture of Francis Su's Harvey Mudd real analysis course, covering the construction of the rational numbers. It begins a full lecture series that follows a standard analysis text.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2018 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec edanm · 2018-03 · on “Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?”
I highly recommend Francis Su's Real Analysis Youtube lectures, on Youtube [1]. He is an amazing teacher. I first started trying to learn Real Analysis from Baby Rudin, but I couldn't understand the point behind the ideas introduced there. Then I started watching these lectures, which are based on Baby Rudin and mostly follow it, and it helped a lot (together with reading the main text itself - a crucial step). The only bad thing is that only half of Rudin is covered - the other half is covered in Real Analysis 2, which is unfortunately not online as far as I can tell. [1] [this video]
Strong rec tildedave · 2018-09 · on “Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?”
One of my favorite video series on YouTube is Francis Su's _Real Analysis_. [this video] He walks through the basics of constructing the real numbers, defines metric spaces and proves some topological properties, defines continuous functions, and goes into differentiable functions. The video quality isn't great but his teaching style is phenomenal - he's really great about engaging the class and getting them to walk through the reasoning for each of the theorems.
Recommends matheus2740 · 2018-03 · on “Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?”
I've watched a series of lectures on the subject by Harvey Mudd college, on youtube [1]. It helped me a lot, tho, I'd have to say these are introductory level, not really a deep dive, but more useful as an introduction. [1] [this video]
Recommends philzook · 2019-01 · on “Ask HN: How to self-study mathematics from the undergrad through graduate level?”
John Baez (physicist / category theorist / smort dude) has a list of books to learn math and physics. Is an interesting source to crib from. [LINK] Gerhard t'Hooft has a page on how to become of a good physicist. [LINK] Not math though. I'm not necessarily suggesting that a mountain of books is the best way to go about it. I think I respond best to video lectures. I'm not sure where you're starting from or how applied/pure you want. Here's a quick mind dump some of my favorites and some that I haven't watched. Roughly in order of how much I liked them. Gilbert Strang's Computational Methods for engineers was life changing for me. It is a two part MIT opencourse. [LINK] A Stanford course on t
Recommends antman · 2024-08 · on “Tell HN: I am going to host "Real Analysis" book club meetings”
This series of courses from Francis Su. It is not mentioned a lot but I think it succeeded in creating an intuition on Real Analysis for me. I think it could help people joining this [this video]