Functions: Historical and pedagogical aspects (Q1309154)

The author notes the rather late arrival in mathematics of the notion of function (in some reasonably general sense). He notes that analytic geometry often presented relations between variables without stressing any particular functional relation between them until Euler's advocacy of the differential coefficient in his version of the calculus. The author notes other contexts for functions, including series expansions of the 18th century and continuous non-differentiable functions of the 19th. In his remarks on the consequences of history for teaching, he rightly rejects the modern absurdity as presenting the function as an ordered pair, and advocates using examples from power series expansions, integral representations, and solutions of ordinary differential equations.