Abstract: Infinitesimals are natural products of the human imagination. Their history goes back to the Greek antiquity. Their role in the calculus and analysis has seen dramatic ups and downs. They have stimulated strong opinions and even vitriol. Edwin Hewitt developed hyperreal fields in the 1940s. Abraham Robinson's infinitesimals date from the 1960s. A noncommutative version of infinitesimals, due to Alain Connes, has been in use since the 1990s. We review some of the hyperreal concepts, and compare them with some of the concepts underlying noncommutative geometry.
Recommendations
Cited in
(20)- Gregory's sixth operation
- Cauchy's infinitesimals, his sum theorem, and foundational paradigms
- A footnote to ``The crisis in contemporary mathematics
- Tools, objects, and chimeras: Connes on the role of hyperreals in mathematics
- The Mathematical Intelligencer flunks the Olympics
- To be or not to be constructive, that is not the question
- Proofs and retributions, or: why Sarah can't take limits
- Reverse formalism 16
- Metric completions, the Heine-Borel property, and approachability
- On mathematical realism and applicability of hyperreals
- Noncommutative sets of small doubling
- From nonstandard analysis to various flavours of computability theory
- A Cauchy-Dirac delta function
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3973623 (Why is no real title available?)
- How small can nonzero commutators be?
- Leibniz's infinitesimals: their fictionality, their modern implementations, and their foes from Berkeley to Russell and beyond
- A non-standard analysis of a cultural icon: the case of Paul Halmos
- Multi-level nonstandard analysis and the axiom of choice
- Episodes from the history of infinitesimals
- An integer construction of infinitesimals: toward a theory of eudoxus hyperreals
This page was built for publication: Commuting and noncommuting infinitesimals
Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2856462)
