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> Formal treatments of calculus are based around infinitesimals formal treatments of calculus don't use infinitesimals, and analysis using infinitesimals is ex
by porb121 5y ago
> Formal treatments of calculus are based around infinitesimals
formal treatments of calculus don't use infinitesimals, and analysis using infinitesimals is explicitly separate from traditional analysis
- jyounker 5y agoYou're absolutely right. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote this last night. I meant to say that formal treatments are based around being able to find arbitrarily small neighborhoods around a point, and that this only works when you have something the size of the reals, for which you can find a real-sized space between any two points. It's this infinite self-similarity at any arbitrarily small scale that is at the heart of calculus.