4 ms·

I don't feel you've actually read and understood my criticism. The fact that the theory falls apart for discontinuous functions is just a visible symptom of th

I don't feel you've actually read and understood my criticism. The fact that the theory falls apart for discontinuous functions is just a visible symptom of the deeper problem that the author confuses a definition with a theorem. I don't think this is just theoretically wrong, it also makes no pedagogical sense. To say "we define the integral as being the difference of the antiderivative at the two endpoints, but we can also define it as the Riemann sum" doesn't tell the student anything except "mathematics is magic, don't even bother to understand it". Whereas to be genuine and say "we can prove that the integral can be expressed through the antiderivative (though we choose not to do this here)" doesn't treat the reader like an idiot. I don't think it's impossible to provide an intuitive and non-proof-based account without sacrificing getting things right conceptually. In fact, I provided a template for doing so above.

ajross 7y ago
> To say "we define the integral as being the difference of the antiderivative at the two endpoints, but we can also define it as the Riemann sum" is [like, really bad!] How about if there was a footnote on that point explaining that these two definitions are actually equivalent (for the continuous functions we're talking about) and that the proof is really interesting and can be found in your textbook? Would that meet your requirements? Again, this is just nitpicking. In fact those two definitions are equivalent, as you keep pointing out. You don't have to prove everything in an introductory treatment, and in fact even high school textbooks on this subject don't even try.