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> Or how professors will throw a fit whenever you solve a limit problem using L'Hospital instead of their farcical show-and-dance about limits. They are teache
by effie 4y ago
> Or how professors will throw a fit whenever you solve a limit problem using L'Hospital instead of their farcical show-and-dance about limits.
They are teachers, they want you to think and practice mathematical way of thinking, using minimal set of assumptions. Exercising this discipline in thought to some extent is useful. Using l'Hospital rule to solve simple problems that are easy to solve from first principles is like taking out a fly with a nuke, when you have nukes. Just because you can, does not mean you should.
- raverbashing 4y ago"First principles". I mean, besides the whole pick and choose which first principles to teach and which ones to drop (there are a lot), they might not be as useful as one may think When discussing limits, the tradicional way this is explained is pointless and extra annoying. And then you end up using limits for pretty much nothing after working with derivatives and integrals. So, again, nobody cares. And maybe someone can explain limits better than the "two dials" analogy because that's too much mathematical theatre that doesn't help when a good explanation is actually needed.