Timeline for Why do we teach calculus students the derivative as a limit?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 30, 2013 at 16:38 | comment | added | KConrad | The primes for derivatives are not Newton's notation. That is Lagrange's notation. Newton used a dot for derivatives, which is absent from math books but still used by physicists. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation | |
| Jun 25, 2013 at 3:02 | review | Late answers | |||
| Jun 25, 2013 at 23:12 | |||||
| May 19, 2012 at 7:22 | comment | added | Steven Gubkin | What's wrong with viewing a dx as "a small change in x" and a dy as "a small change in y (resulting from the small change in x)"? | |
| May 19, 2012 at 6:49 | comment | added | David Feldman | Which is all to say Leibniz's notation has its pedagogical dangers too! | |
| May 19, 2012 at 6:49 | comment | added | David Feldman | What puzzled me as a calculus student decades ago was the meaning of the dx and the dy in dy/dx. I thought I'd solved the problem by understanding these components not to have independent meaning outside the "quotient" dy/dx . But then I met differentials in the context of multi-variable calculus and felt despair. Even worse, I saw differentials presented very formally - as "expressions" that "varied" in particular ways under coordinate changes. Only years later, in graduate school, did I finally understand dy and dx as linear variables living in cotangent spaces. | |
| May 19, 2012 at 3:54 | history | answered | William N | CC BY-SA 3.0 |