In mathematics, an infinitesimal number is a quantity that is closer to zero than any standard real number, but that is not zero. The word infinitesimal comes from a 17th-century Modern Latin coinage infinitesimus, which originally referred to the "infinity-th" item in a sequence.
Infinitesimals do not exist in the standard real number system, but they do exist in other number systems, such as the surreal number system and the hyperreal number system, which can be thought of as the real numbers augmented with both infinitesimal and infinite quantities; the augmentations are the reciprocals of one another.
Infinitesimal numbers were introduced in the development of calculus, in which the derivative was first conceived as a ratio of two infinitesimal quantities. This definition was not rigorously formalized. As calculus developed further, infinitesimals were replaced by limits, which can be calculated using the standard real numbers.
Infinitesimals regained popularity in the 20th century with Abraham Robinson's development of nonstandard analysis and the hyperreal numbers, which, after centuries of controversy, showed that a formal treatment of infinitesimal calculus was possible. Following this, mathematicians developed surreal numbers, a related formalization of infinite and infinitesimal numbers that include both hyperreal cardinal and ordinal numbers, which is the largest ordered field.
Vladimir Arnold wrote in 1990:
Nowadays, when teaching analysis, it is not very popular to talk about infinitesimal quantities. Consequently, present-day students are not fully in command of this language. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to have command of it.
The crucial insight for making infinitesimals feasible mathematical entities was that they could still retain certain properties such as angle or slope, even if these entities were infinitely small.
Infinitesimals are a basic ingredient in calculus as developed by Leibniz, including the law of continuity and the transcendental law of homogeneity.
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This course is an introduction to the non-perturbative bootstrap approach to Conformal Field Theory and to the Gauge/Gravity duality, emphasizing the fruitful interplay between these two ideas.
In mathematics, a real number is a number that can be used to measure a continuous one-dimensional quantity such as a distance, duration or temperature. Here, continuous means that pairs of values can have arbitrarily small differences. Every real number can be almost uniquely represented by an infinite decimal expansion. The real numbers are fundamental in calculus (and more generally in all mathematics), in particular by their role in the classical definitions of limits, continuity and derivatives.
The history of calculus is fraught with philosophical debates about the meaning and logical validity of fluxions or infinitesimal numbers. The standard way to resolve these debates is to define the operations of calculus using epsilon–delta procedures rather than infinitesimals. Nonstandard analysis instead reformulates the calculus using a logically rigorous notion of infinitesimal numbers. Nonstandard analysis originated in the early 1960s by the mathematician Abraham Robinson.
In mathematics, an infinitesimal number is a quantity that is closer to zero than any standard real number, but that is not zero. The word infinitesimal comes from a 17th-century Modern Latin coinage infinitesimus, which originally referred to the "infinity-th" item in a sequence. Infinitesimals do not exist in the standard real number system, but they do exist in other number systems, such as the surreal number system and the hyperreal number system, which can be thought of as the real numbers augmented with both infinitesimal and infinite quantities; the augmentations are the reciprocals of one another.
The objective of this PhD thesis is the translation of, and the mathematical commentary on, a 16th-century Latin book. Its author, Diego Palomino is not well known. With a background in theology, he w