News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach (2000) by rsj_hn on Thursday June 03, 2021 @01:07PM (#27384255)
If you are worried about epsilons and deltas being too hard, then you can write your calculus text to not be rigorous rather than trying to make it rigorous with non-standard analysis. I think giving up on some of the formalism while still sketching the ideas of proofs is the way to go from a pedagogical point of view.
Re:Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach (2000) by bgorman on Thursday June 03, 2021 @01:14PM (#27384339)
Have you compared the approaches? I learned with epsilon delta, but I would be interested in seeing data about learning outcomes with alternative approaches.

In my experience, epsilon delta understanding was pretty much unrelated to passing calculus, where tests consisted of formula/substitution crunching.

Re:Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach (2000) by rsj_hn on Thursday June 03, 2021 @02:30PM (#27385429)
> In my experience, epsilon delta understanding was pretty much unrelated to passing calculus, where tests consisted of formula/substitution crunching

That's a shame. There are so many exciting things to learn in calculus that you can skip the epsilon delta stuff and still do so much more than formula/substitution crunching. Calculus is the gateway to differential geometry, topology, mathematical physics, differential equations, taylor series which are useful for numerical approximations and so many other things, analytic number theory, complex analysis, many forms of statistics. So many wonderful things you can do with it.

Imagine using your new found calculus knowledge to show that the orbit of the planets about the sun is an ellipse -- which is what Newton used calculus to do -- OR learning all about epsilons and deltas. Which would be more fun as a student learning calculus. Make the math exciting enough and people will put up with the drudgery of calculations.

Re:Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach (2000) by ska on Thursday June 03, 2021 @04:25PM (#27386831)
> you can write your calculus text to not be rigorous rather than trying to make it rigorous with non-standard analysis.

e.g., many engineering calculus courses, and explicitly some of the texts.

Re:Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach (2000) by mcguire on Thursday June 03, 2021 @02:01PM (#27385068)
"...you can write your calculus text to not be rigorous..."

Oooh, the comments you'll get from other mathematicians...

Re:Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach (2000) by rsj_hn on Thursday June 03, 2021 @02:28PM (#27385402)
I can take the heat. School texts don't need to be rigorous and there are different levels of rigour. I think Bourbaki did more harm than good.