This book explores and articulates the concepts of the continuous and
the infinitesimal from two points of view: the philosophical and the
mathematical. The first section covers the history of these ideas in
philosophy. Chapter one, entitled ‘The continuous and the discrete
in Ancient Greece, the Orient and the European Middle Ages,’
reviews the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and other Ancient
Greeks; the elements of early Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought; and
early Europeans including Henry of Harclay, Nicholas of Autrecourt,
Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicolas Oreme.
The second chapter of the book covers European thinkers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Newton, Leibniz,
Descartes, Arnauld, Fermat, and more. Chapter three, 'The age of
continuity,’ discusses eighteenth century mathematicians including
Euler and Carnot, and philosophers, among them Hume, Kant and Hegel.
Examining the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, the fourth
chapter describes the reduction of the continuous to the discrete,
citing the contributions of Bolzano, Cauchy and Reimann. Part one of
the book concludes with a chapter on divergent conceptions of the
continuum, with the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century
philosophers and mathematicians, including Veronese, Poincaré,
Brouwer, and Weyl. Part two of this book covers contemporary
mathematics, discussing topology and manifolds, categories, and
functors, Grothendieck topologies, sheaves, and elementary topoi.
Among the theories presented in detail are non-standard analysis,
constructive and intuitionist analysis, and smooth infinitesimal
analysis/synthetic differential geometry. No other book so thoroughly
covers the history and development of the concepts of the continuous
and the infinitesimal.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9783030187071
Publisert
2019
Utgiver
Vendor
Springer
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter