MATH 267: Introduction to Abstract Math

Fall 2026


Preparing a course schedule is typically an exercise in fiction-writing. However, we hope to roughly follow this schedule.
Reading refers to chapters of Reading, Writing, and Proving by Gorkin and Daepp, to be completed before that class meeting; a short reading reflection on it is due at 11:59pm the night before.
Notes are the typed class notes, posted as they are submitted — claim your two dates on the Course Notes Sign-Up sheet.

Date Lecture Reading Notes Handouts
Week 1
8/24 Course Introduction; Theorems, Definitions, and Proofs Chapter 1
(read after class)
Notes
Erum Hussain
8/26 Logical Statements: connectives, truth tables, implication Chapter 2 Notes
Erum Hussain
Week 2
8/31 The Contrapositive and the Converse Chapter 3 Notes
Jenna Klein
9/2 Set Notation; Variables and Quantifiers; negating quantified statements Chapter 4 Notes
Zoë Barnes
Week 3
9/7 No Class - Labor Day (University Closed)
9/9 The Simplest Proofs: direct proof and the contrapositive Chapter 5 Notes
Tabitha Dixon
Week 4
9/14 Proof Techniques: contradiction, proof by cases, counterexamples Chapter 5 Notes
Virginia Smith
9/16 Sets: subsets, set equality, proving containment Chapter 6 Notes
Virginia Smith
Week 5
9/21 Operations on Sets: union, intersection, complement, difference; De Morgan's laws Chapter 7 Notes
Joshua Sekyere Cobblah
9/23 Mathematical Induction Chapter 8 Notes
Joshua Sekyere Cobblah
Week 6
9/28 Complete Induction; Recursion; the Well Ordering Principle Chapter 8
9/30 More on Operations on Sets: families of sets, index sets, indexed unions and intersections Chapter 9
Week 7
10/5 The Power Set and the Cartesian Product; Review for Midterm Exam 1 (~20 min) Chapter 10
10/7 Midterm Exam 1 (Chapters 1-10, 75 minutes)
Week 8
10/12 Relations; Equivalence Relations Chapter 11
10/14 Partitions and equivalence classes Chapter 12
Week 9
10/19 Order in the Reals: inequalities, upper bounds, suprema; the Archimedean property (Chapter 14) Chapter 13
10/21 Functions, Domain, and Range Chapter 15
Week 10
10/26 Injective, Surjective and Bijective Functions Chapter 16
10/28 Inverses and Composition Chapter 17
Week 11
11/2 Images and Inverse Images; continuous functions Chapter 18
11/4 Sequences Chapter 19
Week 12
11/9 Convergence of Sequences of Real Numbers Chapter 20
11/11 Catch-Up / Flexible Day — material carried over from earlier in the term
Week 13
11/16 Cauchy Sequences and Completeness; Review for Midterm Exam 2 Chapter 20
11/18 Midterm Exam 2 (Chapters 11-13, 15-20)
Week 14
11/23 Equivalent Sets Chapter 21
11/25 No Class - Thanksgiving Holiday (University Closed)
Week 15
11/30 Cardinality: finite sets, countable and uncountable sets; Cantor's diagonal argument; the Cantor-Schröder-Bernstein theorem Chapters 22-24
12/2 Congruence Modulo m; Modular Arithmetic Chapter 28
Week 16
12/7 The GCD, the Euclidean algorithm, and Modular Inverses; open and closed subsets of R (time permitting); Review for the Final Exam Chapter 28
12/11 Final Exam - Friday, December 11, 12:30-2:30 p.m. (cumulative)