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, and should be completed before the class meeting it is listed with. Notes refers to the corresponding sections of the MATH 267 lecture notes.

Date Lecture Reading Notes Additional Topics
Week 1
8/24 Course Introduction; Theorems, Definitions, and Proofs Chapter 1 §1 Proof Writing Tips; Spotlight: George Pólya; Tips on Doing Homework
8/26 Logical Statements: connectives, truth tables, implication Chapter 2 §2
Week 2
8/31 The Contrapositive and the Converse Chapter 3 §2
9/2 Set Notation; Variables and Quantifiers; negating quantified statements Chapter 4 §2.1-2.2 Tips on Quantification
Week 3
9/7 No Class - Labor Day (University Closed)
9/9 The Simplest Proofs: direct proof and the contrapositive Chapter 5 §3 Tips on Definitions
Week 4
9/14 Proof Techniques: contradiction, proof by cases, counterexamples Chapter 5 §3
9/16 Sets: subsets, set equality, proving containment Chapter 6 §9.1 Spotlight: Paradoxes
Week 5
9/21 Operations on Sets; families of sets, indexed unions and intersections Chapters 7-8 §9.2-9.3, 14.1 De Morgan's laws
9/23 The Power Set and the Cartesian Product Chapter 9 §9.3 Tips on Writing Mathematics
Week 6
9/28 Relations; Equivalence Relations Chapter 10 §12.1 Tips on Reading Mathematics
9/30 Partitions and equivalence classes; order relations Chapter 11 §12.1-12.2 Tips on Putting It All Together
Week 7
10/5 Review for Midterm Exam 1 Chapters 1-11
10/7 Midterm Exam 1 (Chapters 1-11)
Week 8
10/12 Order in the Reals: inequalities, upper bounds, suprema Chapter 12 §5 The Archimedean property (from Chapter 13); Tips: You Solved It. Now What?
10/14 Catch-Up / Flexible Day Reserved for material carried over from earlier in the term
Week 9
10/19 Functions, Domain, and Range Chapter 14 §10.1 Spotlight: The Definition of Function
10/21 Injective, Surjective and Bijective Functions; Inverses and composition Chapters 15-16 §10.2
Week 10
10/26 Images and Inverse Images Chapter 17 §15.1 Spotlight: Minimum or Infimum?; continuous functions (§15.2)
10/28 Catch-Up / Flexible Day Reserved for material carried over from earlier in the term
Week 11
11/2 Mathematical Induction Chapter 18 §4.1
11/4 Complete Induction; Recursion; the Well Ordering Principle Chapter 18 §4.2-4.3
Week 12
11/9 Sequences Chapter 19 §6
11/11 Convergence of Sequences of Real Numbers Chapter 20 §7
Week 13
11/16 Cauchy Sequences and Completeness; Review for Midterm Exam 2 Chapter 20 §8.1
11/18 Midterm Exam 2 (Chapters 12, 14-20)
Week 14
11/23 Equivalent Sets Chapter 21 §11.1
11/25 No Class - Thanksgiving Holiday (University Closed)
Week 15
11/30 Cardinality: finite sets, countable and uncountable sets; the Cantor-Schröder-Bernstein theorem Chapters 22-24 §11.2 Cantor's diagonal argument; Spotlight: The Continuum Hypothesis
12/2 Congruence Modulo m; Modular Arithmetic Chapter 27 §13.1-13.3
Week 16
12/7 The GCD, the Euclidean algorithm, and Modular Inverses; Review for the Final Exam Chapter 27 §13.4 Open and closed subsets of R (§14.2), time permitting
12/11 Final Exam - Friday, December 11, 12:30-2:30 p.m. (cumulative)