Re:The Math Myth
by soVeryTired on Saturday September 03, 2016 @09:58AM
(#12419208)
Limits use a construction that's pretty similar to an infinitesimal. The epsilon-delta definition of a limit is no joke for students.
Re:The Math Myth
by alejohausner on Saturday September 03, 2016 @10:56AM
(#12419413)
Oddly enough, I never understood the epsilon-delta description of limits until I read David Foster Wallace's book on infinity. All through my degree in math I was taught about things without learning the historical context that created those things.
Re:The Math Myth
by SomeStupidPoint on Saturday September 03, 2016 @02:19PM
(#12420344)
I'm always super happy that I stumbled in to taking topology before real analysis.
It meant that I understood the topological idea of limits before I had to do proofs using just the epsilon (for sequence) or epsilon-delta (for functions) definition, and so could translate the logic of showing things about neighborhoods in to the terminology of (real analysis) limits.
Limits, in the abstract, are a fairly simple concept: in the case of sequences, for any neighborhood of the limit, the entire tail of the sequence (past some point) is contained in the neighborhood; in the case of functions, for any neighborhood of the limit at f(x), there's a neighborhood around x, such that every point in that neighborhood maps to the neighborhood around the limit.
You're spot-on about needing to understand there's a distinction between a number and its decimal representation, though.