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Full Idea
The infinitesimals are the ghosts of departed quantities.
Gist of Idea
Infinitesimals are ghosts of departed quantities
Source
George Berkeley (The Analyst [1734]), quoted by David Bostock - Philosophy of Mathematics 4.3
Book Ref
Bostock,David: 'Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction' [Wiley-Blackwell 2009], p.96
A Reaction
[A famous phrase, but as yet no context for it]
21382 | Things get smaller without end [Anaxagoras] |
18081 | Nature uses the infinite everywhere [Leibniz] |
18080 | A tangent is a line connecting two points on a curve that are infinitely close together [Leibniz] |
18091 | Infinitesimals are ghosts of departed quantities [Berkeley] |
18085 | Values that approach zero, becoming less than any quantity, are 'infinitesimals' [Cauchy] |
18086 | Weierstrass eliminated talk of infinitesimals [Weierstrass, by Kitcher] |
18110 | Infinitesimals are not actually contradictory, because they can be non-standard real numbers [Bostock] |
18083 | With infinitesimals, you divide by the time, then set the time to zero [Kitcher] |
18834 | Infinitesimals do not stand in a determinate order relation to zero [Rumfitt] |