Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Yeah, and furthermore for calculus we all still pay the price because limits are honestly only taught as a holdover from that attempt to prove to other math people calculus was legit. You don't actually need an understanding of limits at all for nearly anything you do in calculus, but the big standardized tests include it so everyone is forced to teach it anyways.
Also IIRC neither Laplace nor Gauss were the actual very first dudes to propose the Normal distribution, that was actually de Moivre as a binomial approximation (who ALSO got robbed of Poisson distribution naming rights). Though Laplace was doubly a reputational victim, since he furthermore got robbed of credit somewhat because he was the dude who did most of the work with Bayesian statistics and inference much like he did for calculus. Sir Bayes didn't even publish his stuff himself. And Laplace did most of the cleanup work for Newton's gravitational theories.
But yeah, naming in math and science is a bit of a mess.
I'm going to defer to the mathematicians on what it is "for", but analysis is one of the major fields of modern mathematics - you need limits to do almost anything rigorous with general real numbers. I agree the only thing you explicitly use limits for in high school maths is making calculus look rigorous, but other very obvious applications in "maths for physicists" are summing infinite series and explaining what it means for numerical algorithms to converge. But limits come up everywhere - in frequentist statistics probability is a limit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link