Galileo and Leibniz: Different approaches to infinity (Q1302116)

The rather ordinary title of this paper -- Different approaches to infinity -- does not give justice to its real interest and to its acuteness. This paper has obviously been written as a reaction to usual sentences lightly written by mathematicians and even by historians of mathematics. Such like: ``The pioneers of the method of indivisibles were not clear about what exactly an indivisible is''. With two cases, Galileo and Leibniz, the present paper clearly and carefully shows that the vocabulary on indivisibles and related objects used by the two famous authors was extremely precise. And to prove it the author gives precise quotations, which are particularly welcomed. He thus criticizes quite a lot of professional translators (duly quoted), in the sense that they helped by vague translations to provide the representation of vagueness in Galileo or Leibniz, and some other mathematicians on questions related to infinity. The present paper is rather short, and does not endlessly repeat arguments: it aims to indicate that Galileo had a non-quanta concept of the infinite, and that Leibniz had a quanta concept of the infinite. It is no wonder that in the last case a good use is made of the remarkable On the arithmetical quadrature of the circle, the ellipse and the hyperbola (a manuscript in Latin) edited by \textit{E. Knobloch}, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht (1993; Zbl 0919.01016). It is shown that a paradox of the kind - the part being greater than the whole -- and coming from the (infinite) value of the area under a hyperbola, was precisely explained by Leibniz from a confusion made between an indivisible like a point and an infinitely small quantity.