Simple to say but hard to solve - eviltoast

(Inspired by Reddit post of the last month)

      • Magnetar@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I mean they’re right, Leibniz used a modified s for summa, sum. And an integral is just a sum, an infinite sum over infinitesimal summands, but a sum nevertheless.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          No judgement, but you should know it’s not that simple. You can’t just pull out your calculator and add together an uncountably infinite collection of values one-by-one.

          I mean, you could add together a finite subset of the values, which turns out to be the only practical way fairly often because a symbolic solution is too hard to find. You don’t get the actual answer that way, though, just an approximation.

          The actual symbolic approaches to integrals are very algebra-heavy and they often require more than one whiteboard to solve by hand. Blackpenredpen “math for fun” on YouTube if you want to see it done at peak performance.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        ACKTUALLY neither. It’s most simply thought of as a limit of progressively longer sums. Infinitesimals help people understand but they’re kind of logically questionable.