"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Physical World (1959) Ch. 22: The Differential Calculus pp.382-383.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematical_proof
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Mathematical proof
43 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Mathematical proof →
Related Quotes
"The physicists didn't want to be bothered with the idea that maybe quantum theory is only provisional. A horn of plen…"
"Now Gödel's proof, Russell's original paradox, all these things, all stem from one common root which is inherent in a…"
"In the summer of 1914 I attended Frege's course, Logik in der Mathematik. Here he examined critically some of the cus…"
"On the subject of demonstrations, it is to be remarked that the Hindu mathematicians proved propositions both algebra…"
"Pythagoras did not possess a proof of the theorem which bears his name... he was temperamentally uninterested in proo…"
"Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself."
"Another roof, another proof."
"Paul Erdős, although an atheist, spoke of an imaginary book, in which God has written down all the most beautiful mat…"
"It really is worth the trouble to invent a new symbol if we can thus remove not a few logical difficulties and ensure…"
"The great masters of modern analysis are Lagrange, Laplace, and Gauss, who were contemporaries. It is interesting to …"