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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2402 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 24, 2026

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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.

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.

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