Timeline for Why have mathematicians used differential equations to model nature instead of difference equations
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 9, 2014 at 18:01 | comment | added | Gottfried William | I think as A.U. says, it may be a fantasy. I have the textbook referred to here : Zel'dovich Y., 1963, Higher Mathematics for Beginners and Its Application to Physics, Moscow : Government Publishers of Physical Mathematical Literature. It's a nice textbook! I think Arnold must have misread something. Y.Z. uses introduces limits and then derivatives without suggesting or saying anything Arnold mentioned. And "sufficiently small in each case" is exactly how most textbooks and Y.Z. (and Leibnitz) introduced delta in derivatives: smaller than any number given, but not 0 to avoid the 0/0 case. | |
| Oct 5, 2014 at 20:10 | comment | added | Pietro Majer | That recalls me of the "Arithmetic of Beans", explicitly created by an odd fellow to count beans. His point was that integer numbers like five do not exist, whereas "five beans" do. | |
| Oct 2, 2014 at 10:45 | comment | added | Alexey Ustinov | @Ben Crowell Unfortunately it is not known. It can be Arnold's fantasy as well. | |
| Oct 2, 2014 at 5:26 | comment | added | user21349 | I want to know what units the $10^{-10}$ is expressed in. | |
| Oct 1, 2014 at 1:21 | comment | added | S. Carnahan♦ | This conjecture about the fine structure of space and time would be easier to take seriously if there were another zero in the exponent. $10^{-10}$ is way too large to be a reasonable bound on continuum models of reality. Even 19th century experiments like Michelson-Morley were sensitive to length variations on that order. | |
| Sep 30, 2014 at 20:38 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Sep 30, 2014 at 14:28 | history | answered | Alexey Ustinov | CC BY-SA 3.0 |