Bridging the gap between procedural mathematics that emphasizes calculations and conceptual mathematics that focuses on ideas, Mathematics: A Minimal Introduction presents an undergraduate-level introduction to pure mathematics and basic concepts of logic. The author builds logic and mathematics from scratch using essentially no background except natural language. He also carefully avoids circularities that are often encountered in related books and places special emphasis on separating the language of mathematics from metalanguage and eliminating semantics from set theory.

The first part of...