Books / Sample

Preface

This is not Spivak’s book. It is what I write down as I read him: definitions I am willing to live with, computations that actually cancel, and the places I got stuck. The original remains Spivak (1967). I do not copy its exercises or its wording.

A chapter is a folder. The page you are on sits at the book root, before any chapter, because a book can have a preface without pretending the preface is Chapter 1. If this file were missing, the reconstruction would begin at Foundations and nothing else would change.

I am writing in order. Later chapters may point backward; they should not assume I have already invented the derivative.