Adding infinitesimals

[Jehanne]

Thanks; that makes the concept much clearer.  When I first took calculus 30 years ago, the class was not taught with infinitesimals; in fact, they weren't even mentioned.

Maybe not exactly in this form, on usually talks about Leibniz's differentials dx or whatever you want to call them. You must have used the Leibniz calculus df/dx and all that in differentiation and integration, right?

My classes used the standard 3-semester textbook, with the introduction to calculus being based upon limits.  I am sure that limits and infinitesimals are intimately related; however, approaching things from the perspective of infinitesimals has, for me at least, made things easier to understand.

[ignoramus]

Now those do sound like robot acrobats

I like christoids better.
No-one does acrobatics as well or as often.

Hey Rob, what's the square root of infinity?
Use crayons to explain it better for me if you need to.
Also infinity divided by infinity =1. Obviously! Now where's my Nobel prize?

[robvalue]

Lol good point

The square root of infinity is colon surgery.

[Alex K]

Maybe not exactly in this form, on usually talks about Leibniz's differentials dx or whatever you want to call them. You must have used the Leibniz calculus df/dx and all that in differentiation and integration, right?

My classes used the standard 3-semester textbook, with the introduction to calculus being based upon limits.  I am sure that limits and infinitesimals are intimately related; however, approaching things from the perspective of infinitesimals has, for me at least, made things easier to understand.

My calculus lectures at Uni were done by pure mathematicians and also didn't use the dx symbols. Doing it using limits is more rigorous I guess, or at least more obviously rigorous

[brewer]

Are there infinitesimal oxymoron's? Like jumbo shrimp?

[ignoramus]

Army intelligence?

[brewer]

Gigantic infinitesimal. Galactic infinitesimal.

[Fireball]

My personal favorite, for gravitational lensing- "Taking a galaxy as a point mass...". Freaked out a lot of kids in physics class. I just rolled with it. The universe is a really big place, and galaxies aren't all that big, relatively speaking.