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A Primer of Infinitesimal Analysis

John L. Bell · 2 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
One of the most remarkable recent occurrences in mathematics is the re-founding, on a rigorous basis, the idea of infinitesimal quantity, a notion which played an important role in the early development of the calculus and mathematical analysis. In this new and updated edition, basic calculus, together with some of its applications to simple physical problems, are presented through the use of a straightforward, rigorous, axiomatically formulated concept of ‘zero-square’, or ‘nilpotent’ infinitesimal - that is, a quantity so small that its square and all higher powers can be set, to zero. The systematic employment of these infinitesimals reduces the differential calculus to simple algebra and, at the same time, restores to use the “infinitesimal” methods figuring in traditional applications of the calculus to physical problems - a number of which are discussed in this book. This edition also contains an expanded historical and philosophical introduction.
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You might be interested in the book A Primer of Infinitesimal Analysis by John L. Bell, which is another approach to infinitesimals that uses intuitionistic logic.

https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Infinitesimal-Analysis-John-Be...

Any interesting property of this logic and model is that all functions are infinitely differentiable.

Other introductions are An Invitation to Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis by John L. Bell and Synthetic Differential Geometry by Michael Shulman.

http://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/invitation%20to%20SIA.pdf

http://home.sandiego.edu/~shulman/papers/sdg-pizza-seminar.p...

This kind of approach simply doesn't make sense

It was poorly explained there, but essentially that style of reasoning does work: http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Infinitesimal-Analysis-John-Bel...

And I at least find that approach easier and more useful. (I learned it from the Feynman lectures on physics, where he didn't axiomatize it; the above link does.)

stiff
I find the logically sound version of the infinitesimals approach to be much more difficult to understand than the approach using limits. For example, you have to introduce hyperreals to make it work (most common approach):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number

abecedarius
The book I linked to uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_infinitesimal_analysis (a quite different approach). I haven't studied nonstandard analysis.
nopinsight
How would you explain the continued popularity of 103-year-old "Calculus Made Easy" then? The method used in the book might not be rigorous enough to solve all calculus problems but it jives well with a large number of people.

Most of them could get a better intuitive understanding of Calculus. (We should of course conduct a rigorous study comparing the effects of using different approaches to teach Introductory Calculus.) Then those who need to use the limits approach for other courses could use the intuition to learn it faster. In addition, they would understand Calculus from two different angles and could select the more suitable approach for each problem.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy

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