Paul N <gw7rib@aol.com> wrote:

Hi all

Recently there was a discussion in comp.theory about infinitesimals. It seems

I can't post to that group but can post to this one, so hopefully people will not mind too much and some kind person might even post a link there to my post here? > > I wanted to point out that Ian Stewart had written an article called "Beyond the vanishing point" in which he discusses the strange situation in which doing calculus by using very small numbers and then treating these numbers
as zero after you've divided through by them is not valid but nevertheless seems
to work. Here is some of the article as a taster:


I respect Ian Stewart because of his books, but here is being an alarmist.

Continuous functions are defined as those for which the infinitesmal analysis works. Calculus applies to such functions.

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