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The Origins of Infinitesimal Calculus focuses on the evolution, development, and applications of infinitesimal calculus. The publication first ponders on Greek mathematics, transition to Western Europe, and some center of gravity determinations in the later 16th century. Discussions focus on the growth of kinematics in the West, latitude of forms, influence of Aristotle, axiomatization of Greek mathematics, theory of proportion and means, method of exhaustion, discovery method of Archimedes, and curves, normals, tangents, and curvature. The manuscript then examines infinitesimals and indivisibles in the early 17th century and further advances in France and Italy. Topics include the link between differential and integral processes, concept of tangent, first investigations of the cycloid, and arithmetization of integration methods. The book reviews the infinitesimal methods in England and Low Countries and rectification of arcs. The publication is a vital source of information for historians, mathematicians, and researchers interested in infinitesimal calculus.
Few among the numerous studies of calculus offer the detailed and fully documented historical perspective of this text, particularly in regard to the geometric techniques and methods developed prior to the work of Newton and Leibniz. Because the contributions of these and other mathematicians arose from a centuries-long struggle to investigate area, volume, tangent, and arc by purely geometric methods, the author begins by establishing background mathematical concepts. Dr. Baron provides an enlightening view of the Greek, Hindu, and Arabic sources that constituted the framework for the development of infinitesimal methods in the seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters offer an illuminating discussion of the arithmetization of integration methods, the role of investigation of special curves, concepts of tangent and arc, the composition of motions, and the developing link between differential and integral processes. Significant changes in proof structure and presentation are considered in relation to the formulation of rules for the construction of tangents and quadrature of curves. An Epilogue concludes the text with a brief chronological survey of the early work of Newton and Leibniz, based on material drawn from original manuscripts. Book jacket.
This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present. The Mathematical Imagination is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
The calculus has served for three centuries as the principal quantitative language of Western science. In the course of its genesis and evolution some of the most fundamental problems of mathematics were first con fronted and, through the persistent labors of successive generations, finally resolved. Therefore, the historical development of the calculus holds a special interest for anyone who appreciates the value of a historical perspective in teaching, learning, and enjoying mathematics and its ap plications. My goal in writing this book was to present an account of this development that is accessible, not solely to students of the history of mathematics, but to the wider mathematical community for which my exposition is more specifically intended, including those who study, teach, and use calculus. The scope of this account can be delineated partly by comparison with previous works in the same general area. M. E. Baron's The Origins of the Infinitesimal Calculus (1969) provides an informative and reliable treat ment of the precalculus period up to, but not including (in any detail), the time of Newton and Leibniz, just when the interest and pace of the story begin to quicken and intensify. C. B. Boyer's well-known book (1949, 1959 reprint) met well the goals its author set for it, but it was more ap propriately titled in its original edition-The Concepts of the Calculus than in its reprinting.
On August 10, 1632, five leading Jesuits convened in a sombre Roman palazzo to pass judgment on a simple idea: that a continuous line is composed of distinct and limitlessly tiny parts. The doctrine would become the foundation of calculus, but on that fateful day the judges ruled that it was forbidden. With the stroke of a pen they set off a war for the soul of the modern world. Amir Alexander takes us from the bloody religious strife of the sixteenth century to the battlefields of the English civil war and the fierce confrontations between leading thinkers like Galileo and Hobbes. The legitimacy of popes and kings, as well as our modern beliefs in human liberty and progressive science, hung in the balance; the answer hinged on the infinitesimal. Pulsing with drama and excitement, Infinitesimal will forever change the way you look at a simple line.
1. Evolution or revolution in mathematics -- 2. Issues in seventeenth century mathematics -- 3. Isaac Barrow: a foil to Leibniz -- 4. A young central European polymath -- 5. First steps in mathematics -- 6. The creation of calculus -- 7. Logic -- 8. The universal characteristic -- 9. The baroque cultural context -- 10. Epilogue -- 11. Some concluding remarks on mathematical change -- Appendices.
This book explores and articulates the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal from two points of view: the philosophical and the mathematical. The first section covers the history of these ideas in philosophy. Chapter one, entitled ‘The continuous and the discrete in Ancient Greece, the Orient and the European Middle Ages,’ reviews the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and other Ancient Greeks; the elements of early Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought; and early Europeans including Henry of Harclay, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicolas Oreme. The second chapter of the book covers European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Arnauld, Fermat, and more. Chapter three, 'The age of continuity,’ discusses eighteenth century mathematicians including Euler and Carnot, and philosophers, among them Hume, Kant and Hegel. Examining the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourth chapter describes the reduction of the continuous to the discrete, citing the contributions of Bolzano, Cauchy and Reimann. Part one of the book concludes with a chapter on divergent conceptions of the continuum, with the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and mathematicians, including Veronese, Poincaré, Brouwer, and Weyl. Part two of this book covers contemporary mathematics, discussing topology and manifolds, categories, and functors, Grothendieck topologies, sheaves, and elementary topoi. Among the theories presented in detail are non-standard analysis, constructive and intuitionist analysis, and smooth infinitesimal analysis/synthetic differential geometry. No other book so thoroughly covers the history and development of the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal.
This book is a complete English translation of Augustin-Louis Cauchy's historic 1823 text (his first devoted to calculus), Résumé des leçons sur le calcul infinitésimal, "Summary of Lectures on the Infinitesimal Calculus," originally written to benefit his École Polytechnique students in Paris. Within this single text, Cauchy succinctly lays out and rigorously develops all of the topics one encounters in an introductory study of the calculus, from his classic definition of the limit to his detailed analysis of the convergence properties of infinite series. In between, the reader will find a full treatment of differential and integral calculus, including the main theorems of calculus and detailed methods of differentiating and integrating a wide variety of functions. Real, single variable calculus is the main focus of the text, but Cauchy spends ample time exploring the extension of his rigorous development to include functions of multiple variables as well as complex functions. This translation maintains the same notation and terminology of Cauchy's original work in the hope of delivering as honest and true a Cauchy experience as possible so that the modern reader can experience his work as it may have been like 200 years ago. This book can be used with advantage today by anyone interested in the history of the calculus and analysis. In addition, it will serve as a particularly valuable supplement to a traditional calculus text for those readers who desire a way to create more texture in a conventional calculus class through the introduction of original historical sources.