"The difficulty in presenting a rigorous as well as clear statement of the theory of limits is inherent in the subject. ...If the reader has found some difficulty in grasping it he may be less discouraged when he is told that it eluded even Newton and Leibniz. ... Many contemporaries of Newton, among them ... taught that the calculus was a collection of ingenious fallacies. ... decided that he could found calculus properly... The book was undoubtedly profound but also unintelligible. One hundred years after the time of Newton and Leibniz, Joseph Louis Lagrange... still believed that the calculus was unsound and gave correct results only because errors were offsetting each other. He, too, formulated his own foundation... but it was incorrect. ...D'Alembert had to advise students of the calculus... faith would eventually come to them. This is not bad advice... but it is no substitute for rigor and proof. ... About a century and a half after the creation of calculus... Augustin Louis Cauchy... finally gave a definitive formulation of the limit concept that removed doubts as to the soundness of the subject."
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Fellows of the Royal SocietyUniversity of Glasgow alumniMathematicians from ScotlandUniversity of Edinburgh facultyUniversity of Aberdeen faculty
Original Language: English
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Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Physical World (1959) Ch. 22: The Differential Calculus pp.382-383.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Colin_Maclaurin
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Colin Maclaurin
Colin Maclaurin (February 1698 – 14 June 1746) M'Laurine, or MacLaurin, was a Scottish mathematician who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. He is also known for being a child prodigy and holding the record for being the youngest professor. The Maclaurin series, a special case of the , is named after him.
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