The teaching of mathematics has undergone extensive changes in approach, with a shift in emphasis from rote memorization to acquiring an understanding of the logical foundations and methodology of problem solving. This book offers guidance in that direction, exploring arithmetic's underlying concepts and their logical development. This volume's great merit lies in its wealth of explanatory material, designed to promote an informal and intuitive understanding of the rigorous logical approach to the number system. The first part explains and comments on axioms and definitions, making their subsequent treatment more coherent. The second part presents a detailed, systematic construction of the number systems of rational, real, and complex numbers. It covers whole numbers, hemigroups and groups, integers, ordered fields, the order relation for rationals, exponentiation, and real and complex numbers. Every step is justified by a reference to the appropriate theorem or lemma. Exercises following each chapter in Part II help readers test their progress and provide practice in using the relevant concepts.

Patrick, a young attorney, runs every day and gives up coffee. Mary, a school teacher loves her aerobics and fresh veggies. Yet they die in their thirties. What about their children? With love, faith, an Irish temper and humor, Anne, the grandmother, tells of her traumatic, yet hilarious journey through her daughters funeral, governmental red tape, the demise of the encyclopedia and the advent of the electronic world, a governmental error of $45,000 and its ultimate act of horror, the eighteenand-out Law. In retrospect she researches the abandonment of parentless children by the government to offer a womans commonsense solution.