Material Detail

The text began as a set of lecture notes for the discrete mathematics course at the University of Northern Colorado. This course serves both as an introduction to topics in discrete math and as the "introduction to proofs" course for math majors. The course is usually taught with a large amount of student inquiry, and this text is written to help facilitate this.

Four main topics are covered: counting, sequences, logic, and graph theory. Along the way, proofs are introduced, including proofs by contradiction, proofs by induction, and combinatorial proofs. An introductory chapter covering mathematical statements, sets, and functions helps students gain familiarity with the language of mathematics, and two additional topics (generating functions and number theory) are also included.

While the book began as a set of lecture notes, it now contains a number of features that should support its use as a primary textbook:

• 473 exercises, including 275 with solutions and another 109 with hints. Exercises range from easy to quite involved, with many problems suitable for homework.
• Investigate! activities throughout the text to support active, inquiry based learning.
• A full index and list of symbols.
• Consistent and helpful page layout and formatting (i.e., examples are easy to identify, important definitions and theorems in boxes, etc.).

The book is free and open source.  PDF and interactive HTML ebook options are available, as well as an inexpensive paperback.  Full source (in PreTeXt or LaTeX) is available on GitHub.  Instructor resources are available upon request.

The textbook has been used at more than 25 institutions since 2013. The text is endoursed by the American Institute of Mathematics' Open Textbook Initiative and is well reviewed on the Open Textbook Library.

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