Serhat Diyaroğlu
@InFlames2
öğrenci
İTÜ
İstanbul
İstanbul, 18 Ağustos
7 kütüphaneci puanı (Geçen ay: 4)
345 okur puanı
Eylül 2019 tarihinde katıldı
Calculus gave the right answers, even when its creators couldn’t explain why. The desire to harness infinity and exploit its power is a narrative thread that runs through the whole twenty-five-hundred-year story of calculus.
The Infinity Principle
To shed light on any continuous shape, object, motion, process, or phenomenon —no matter how wild and complicated it may appear—reimagine it as an infinite series of simpler parts, analyze those, and then add the results back together to make sense of the original whole.
According to legend, Pythagoras felt it around 550 bce when he and his disciples discovered that music was governed by the ratios of whole numbers. For instance, imagine plucking a guitar string. As the string vibrates, it emits a certain note. Now put your finger on a fret exactly halfway up the string and pluck it again. The vibrating part of the string is now half as long as it used to be—a ratio of 1 to 2—and it sounds precisely an octave higher than the original.
Eugene Wigner
“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither
understand nor deserve.”
Calculus, like other forms of mathematics, is much more than a language; it’s also an incredibly powerful system of reasoning. It lets us transform one equation into another by performing various symbolic operations on them, operations subject to certain rules. Those rules are deeply rooted in logic, so even though it might seem like we’re just shuffling symbols around, we’re actually constructing long chains of logical inference.