Description

'The presentation is modeled on the discursive style of the Bourbaki collective, and the coverage of topics is rich and varied. Grandis has provided a large selection of exercises and has sprinkled orienting comments throughout. For an undergraduate library where strong students seek an overview of a significant portion of mathematics, this would be an excellent acquisition. Summing up: Recommended.'CHOICESince the last century, a large part of Mathematics is concerned with the study of mathematical structures, from groups to fields and vector spaces, from lattices to Boolean algebras, from metric spaces to topological spaces, from topological groups to Banach spaces.More recently, these structured sets and their transformations have been assembled in higher structures, called categories.We want to give a structural overview of these topics, where the basic facts of the different theories are unified through the 'universal properties' that they satisfy, and their particularities stand out, perhaps even more.This book can be used as a textbook for undergraduate studies and for self-study. It can provide students of Mathematics with a unified perspective of subjects which are often kept apart. It is also addressed to students and researchers of disciplines having strong interactions with Mathematics, like Physics and Chemistry, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering.