Showing posts with label Bishop Berkeley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bishop Berkeley. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Ghosts of Departed Quantities

     Years ago in calculus class I excitedly learned that an infinite number of terms may have a finite sum.  Manipulation of infinities seems somewhat routine to me now but my early ideas of calculus enlarged me a thousand-fold.  Algebra was a language, geometry was a world-view, and calculus was a big idea.  Like any big idea, even though it had been hundreds of years in formation, it met with resistance.  In 1764 Bishop George Berkeley attacked the logical foundations of the calculus that Isaac Newton had unified.  Here, from the online mathematics magazine plus,  is a description of the attack.