Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2016
When I started teaching real analysis to first-year college of education students, I thought that at least I ought to be consistent in what I said. When I told the students what a word meant, I thought they ought to hear the same story as they heard from my colleagues who were teaching other branches of mathematics. I even thought I ought to tell them something like what they would find in a consensus of the real analysis books they might look at. I knew that I ought not to use different meanings for the same word on different occasions. Alas . . .