MA403: Real Analysis
Prof.Gopala Krishna Srinivasan

Review by Arnav Jain

Prerequisite

None except 1st year core courses

Motivation

If you did not like playing with epsilons and deltas in your first year, this course is not for you. It is a rigourous, hard core mathemtical course with little to no application and requires dedication throughout the semester. That being said, it is also a great course to see how rigourous proofs are written, and has some beautiful results to learn. It is also a pre requisite for two of the MA minor courses, and a lot of other MA dept courses.

Feedback on Lectures

Lectures were fast paced and tiring; missing even one was a setback. That being said, prof GKS provided his handwritten notes to us, which was a beautiful collage of his experience in mathematics; while Rudin is the primary reference of the course, he recommended and used a vast variety of books, and hence his lectures had always something to take from which you cannot get from just reading a reference book, even if it is as gold standard as Rudin.

Course Evaluation and Grading

There were two quizzes, a midsemester and an endsemester examination, along with one homework assignment at early stages of the course. The examinations are tough, especially if consistent effort has not been put in, but was largely covered within notes. Cheat sheets were not allowed, and while nobody got a FR or DD, the grading was not very generous as expected from such a course.

Followup courses

MA406 (Topology) and MA522 (Fourier Analysis), both are minor courses with MA403 as pre requisite.

Books

None