#MATH INFINITESIMALS ARE NONSENSE HOW TO#

Europeans of the Middle Ages had no clear idea of negative numbers, perhaps because loaning money for interest was forbidden and most people lived in a cashless agrarian society. The only numbers we 'see' are the natural numbers.starting not at zero but at one. Another article on nonstandard numbers is also dreamy.

However, what surprises me is that Wikipedia allows this to be published. How could Archimedes have used infinitesimals if they do not exist and he had no idea what these are? Furthermore the article states Archimedes used infinitesimals but till this day there is no coherent definition of an 'infinitesimal' and non-standard analysis is at most wishy.

#MATH INFINITESIMALS ARE NONSENSE HOW TO#

He was himself uncertain how to explain the calculation of a gradient or average 'at a point'. Isaac Newton was groping in darkness when he coined this term. Not only this, but there is no evidence that an infinitesimal exists. It is true that such a definition is absolute nonsense. 'An infinitesimal number is a nonstandard number whose modulus is less than any nonzero positive standard number'. If h is such a number, then what is h/2? Or if h is undividable, is it still a number?' Numbers would be to be the least positive number. Considering positive numbers, the only way for a number to be less than all 'When we consider numbers, the naive definition is clearly flawed: an infinitesimal is a number whose modulus is less than any non zero positive number. This article has been rated as Mid-priority on the project's priority scale.Īnyone who reads this article and believes it is truly naive. This article has been rated as C-Class on the project's quality scale. Mathematics Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics Template:WikiProject Mathematics mathematics articles If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mathematics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of mathematics on Wikipedia. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history for the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

The contents of the 1/∞ page were merged into Infinitesimal. This article has been rated as C-Class by WikiProject Vital Articles. Infinitesimal has been listed as a level-5 vital article in Mathematics.

Math infinitesimals are nonsense