无穷小

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• Here, finally, is the true difference between Guldin and Cavalieri, between the Jesuits and the indivisiblists. For the Jesuits, the purpose of mathematics was to establish the world as a fixed and eternally unchanging place, in which order and hierarchy could never be challenged. That is why each item in the world must be carefully and rationally constructed, and why any hint of contradictions or paradoxes could never be allowed to stand. It was a "top-down" mathematics, whose purpose was to bring rationality and order to an otherwise chaotic world. For Cavalieri and his fellow indivisibilists, it was the exact reverse: mathematics began with a material intuition of the world--that plane figures were made up of lines and volumes of planes, just as a cloth was woven of thread and a book co... (查看原文)

  花雨袭人 2018-04-22 13:51:17