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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.

Re:The Math Myth by geoka9 on Saturday September 03, 2016 @02:13PM (#12420306)
Getting a degree in math without understanding epsilon-delta is quite an achievement! I am serious.