Foundations of Modern Analysis

FOUNDATIONS OFMODERN ANALYSISEnlarged and Corrected PrintingJ. DIEUDONNEThis book is the first volume of a treatise which will eventually consist offour volumes. It is also an enlarged and corrected printing, essentiallywithout changes, of my Foundations of Modern Analysis, published in1960. Many readers, colleagues, and friends have urged me to write a sequelto that book, and in the end I became convinced that there was a place fora survey of modern analysis, somewhere between the minimum tool kitof an elementary nature which I had intended to write, and specialistmonographs leading to the frontiers of research. My experience of teachinghas also persuaded me that the mathematical apprentice, after taking the firststep of Foundations, needs further guidance and a kind of general birdseyeview of his subject before he is launched onto the ocean of mathematicalliterature or set on the narrow path of his own topic of research.Thus I have finally been led to attempt to write an equivalent, for themathematicians of 1970, of what the Cours dAnalyse of Jordan, Picard, and Goursat were for mathematical students between 1880 and 1920.It is manifestly out of the question to attempt encyclopedic coverage, andcertainly superfluous to rewrite the works of N. Bourbaki. I have thereforebeen obliged to cut ruthlessly in order to keep within limits comparable tothose of the classical treatises. I have opted for breadth rather than depth, inthe opinion that it is better to show the reader rudiments of many branchesof modern analysis rather than to provide him with a complete and detailedexposition of a small number of topics.Experience seems to show that the student usually finds a new theorydifficult tograsp at a first reading. He needs to return to it several times beforehe becomes really familiar with it and can distinguish for himself whichare the essential ideas and which results are of minor importance, and onlythen will he be able to apply it intelligently. The chapters of this treatise arevi PREFACE TO THE ENLARGED AND CORRECTED PRINTINGtherefore samples rather than complete theories: indeed, I have systematically tried not to be exhaustive. The works quoted in the bibliography willalways enable the reader to go deeper into any particular theory.However, I have refused to distort the main ideas of analysis by presentingthem in too specialized a form, and thereby obscuring their power andgenerality. It gives a false impression, for example, if differential geometryis restricted to two or three dimensions, or if integration is restricted to Lebesgue measure, on the pretext of making these subjects more accessible orintuitive.On the other hand I do not believe that the essential content of the ideasinvolved is lost, in a first study, by restricting attention to separable metrizabletopological spaces. The mathematicians of my own generation were certainlyright to banish, hypotheses of countability wherever they were not needed: thiswas the only way to get a clear understanding.