Infinitesimal
In mathematics, an infinitesimal number is a non-zero quantity that is closer to 0 than any non-zero real number is. The word infinitesimal comes from a 17th-century Modern Latin coinage infinitesimus, which originally referred to the "infinitieth" item in a sequence.
Infinitesimals do not exist in the standard real number system, but they do exist in other number systems, such as the surreal number system and the hyperreal number system, which can be thought of as the real numbers augmented with both infinitesimal and infinite quantities; the augmentations are the reciprocals of one another.
Infinitesimal numbers were introduced in the development of calculus, in which the derivative was first conceived as a ratio of two infinitesimal quantities. This definition was not rigorously formalized. As calculus developed further, infinitesimals were replaced by limits, which can be calculated using the standard real numbers.
In the 3rd century BC Archimedes used what eventually came to be known as the method of indivisibles in his work The Method of Mechanical Theorems to find areas of regions and volumes of solids. In his formal published treatises, Archimedes solved the same problem using the method of exhaustion.
Infinitesimals regained popularity in the 20th century with Abraham Robinson's development of nonstandard analysis and the hyperreal numbers, which, after centuries of controversy, showed that a formal treatment of infinitesimal calculus was possible. Following this, mathematicians developed surreal numbers, a related formalization of infinite and infinitesimal numbers that include both hyperreal cardinal and ordinal numbers, which is the largest ordered field.
Vladimir Arnold wrote in 1990:
An insight for making infinitesimals feasible mathematical entities was that they could still retain certain properties such as angle or slope, even if these entities were infinitely small.
Infinitesimals are a basic ingredient in calculus as developed by Leibniz, including the law of continuity and the transcendental law of homogeneity. In common speech, an infinitesimal object is an object that is smaller than any feasible measurement, but not zero in size—or, so small that it cannot be distinguished from zero by any available means. Hence, when used as an adjective in mathematics, infinitesimal means infinitely small, smaller than any standard real number. Infinitesimals are often compared to other infinitesimals of similar size, as in examining the derivative of a function. An infinite number of infinitesimals are summed to calculate an integral.
The modern concept of infinitesimals was introduced around 1670 by either Nicolaus Mercator or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The 15th century saw the work of Nicholas of Cusa, further developed in the 17th century by Johannes Kepler, in particular, the calculation of the area of a circle by representing the latter as an infinite-sided polygon. Simon Stevin's work on the decimal representation of all numbers in the 16th century prepared the ground for the real continuum. Bonaventura Cavalieri's method of indivisibles led to an extension of the results of the classical authors. The method of indivisibles related to geometrical figures as being composed of entities of codimension 1. John Wallis's infinitesimals differed from indivisibles in that he would decompose geometrical figures into infinitely thin building blocks of the same dimension as the figure, preparing the ground for general methods of the integral calculus. He exploited an infinitesimal denoted 1/∞ in area calculations.
The use of infinitesimals by Leibniz relied upon heuristic principles, such as the law of continuity: what succeeds for the finite numbers succeeds also for the infinite numbers and vice versa; and the transcendental law of homogeneity that specifies procedures for replacing expressions involving unassignable quantities, by expressions involving only assignable ones. The 18th century saw routine use of infinitesimals by mathematicians such as Leonhard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. Augustin-Louis Cauchy exploited infinitesimals both in defining continuity in his Cours d'Analyse, and in defining an early form of a Dirac delta function. As Cantor and Dedekind were developing more abstract versions of Stevin's continuum, Paul du Bois-Reymond wrote a series of papers on infinitesimal-enriched continua based on growth rates of functions. Du Bois-Reymond's work inspired both Émile Borel and Thoralf Skolem. Borel explicitly linked du Bois-Reymond's work to Cauchy's work on rates of growth of infinitesimals. Skolem developed the first non-standard models of arithmetic in 1934. A mathematical implementation of both the law of continuity and infinitesimals was achieved by Abraham Robinson in 1961, who developed nonstandard analysis based on earlier work by Edwin Hewitt in 1948 and Jerzy Łoś in 1955. The hyperreals implement an infinitesimal-enriched continuum and the transfer principle implements Leibniz's law of continuity. The standard part function implements Fermat's adequality.
History of the infinitesimal
The notion of infinitely small quantities was discussed by the Eleatic School. The Greek mathematician Archimedes, in The Method of Mechanical Theorems, was the first to propose a logically rigorous definition of infinitesimals. His Archimedean property defines a number x as infinite if it satisfies the conditions ..., and infinitesimal if and a similar set of conditions holds for x and the reciprocals of the positive integers. A number system is said to be Archimedean if it contains no infinite or infinitesimal members.The English mathematician John Wallis introduced the expression 1/∞ in his 1655 book Treatise on the Conic Sections. The symbol, which denotes the reciprocal, or inverse, of ∞, is the symbolic representation of the mathematical concept of an infinitesimal. In his Treatise on the Conic Sections, Wallis also discusses the concept of a relationship between the symbolic representation of infinitesimal 1/∞ that he introduced and the concept of infinity for which he introduced the symbol ∞. The concept suggests a thought experiment of adding an infinite number of parallelograms of infinitesimal width to form a finite area. This concept was the predecessor to the modern method of integration used in integral calculus. The conceptual origins of the concept of the infinitesimal 1/∞ can be traced as far back as the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, whose Zeno's dichotomy paradox was the first mathematical concept to consider the relationship between a finite interval and an interval approaching that of an infinitesimal-sized interval.
Infinitesimals were the subject of political and religious controversies in 17th century Europe, including a ban on infinitesimals issued by clerics in Rome in 1632.
Prior to the invention of calculus mathematicians were able to calculate tangent lines using Pierre de Fermat's method of adequality and René Descartes' method of normals. There is debate among scholars as to whether the method was infinitesimal or algebraic in nature. When Newton and Leibniz invented the calculus, they made use of infinitesimals, Newton's fluxions and Leibniz' differential. The use of infinitesimals was attacked as incorrect by Bishop Berkeley in his work The Analyst. Mathematicians, scientists, and engineers continued to use infinitesimals to produce correct results. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the calculus was reformulated by Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bernard Bolzano, Karl Weierstrass, Cantor, Dedekind, and others using the -definition of limit and set theory.
While the followers of Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass sought to rid analysis of infinitesimals, and their philosophical allies like Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap declared that infinitesimals are pseudoconcepts, Hermann Cohen and his Marburg school of neo-Kantianism sought to develop a working logic of infinitesimals. The mathematical study of systems containing infinitesimals continued through the work of Levi-Civita, Giuseppe Veronese, Paul du Bois-Reymond, and others, throughout the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, as documented by Philip Ehrlich. In the 20th century, it was found that infinitesimals could serve as a basis for calculus and analysis.
First-order properties
In extending the real numbers to include infinite and infinitesimal quantities, one typically wishes to be as conservative as possible by not changing any of their elementary properties. This guarantees that as many familiar results as possible are still available. Typically, elementary means that there is no quantification over sets, but only over elements. This limitation allows statements of the form "for any number x..." For example, the axiom that states "for any number x, x + 0 = x" would still apply. The same is true for quantification over several numbers, e.g., "for any numbers x and y, xy = yx." However, statements of the form "for any set ''S of numbers ..." may not carry over. Logic with this limitation on quantification is referred to as first-order logic.The resulting extended number system cannot agree with the reals on all properties that can be expressed by quantification over sets, because the goal is to construct a non-Archimedean system, and the Archimedean principle can be expressed by quantification over sets. One can conservatively extend any theory including reals, including set theory, to include infinitesimals, just by adding a countably infinite list of axioms that assert that a number is smaller than 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, and so on. Similarly, the completeness property cannot be expected to carry over, because the reals are the unique complete ordered field up to isomorphism.
There are three categories in which a non-Archimedean number system could have first-order properties compatible with those of the reals:
- An ordered field obeys all the usual axioms of the real number system that can be stated in first-order logic. For example, the commutativity axiom