This book explores and articulates the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal from two points of view: the philosophical and the mathematical. The first section covers the history of these ideas in philosophy. Chapter one, entitled ‘The continuous and the discrete in Ancient Greece, the Orient and the European Middle Ages,’ reviews the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and other Ancient Greeks; the elements of early Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought; and early Europeans including Henry of Harclay, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicolas Oreme. The second chapter of the book covers European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Arnauld, Fermat, and more. Chapter three, 'The age of continuity,’ discusses eighteenth century mathematicians including Euler and Carnot, and philosophers, among them Hume, Kant and Hegel. Examining the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourth chapter describes the reduction of the continuous to the discrete, citing the contributions of Bolzano, Cauchy and Reimann. Part one of the book concludes with a chapter on divergent conceptions of the continuum, with the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and mathematicians, including Veronese, Poincaré, Brouwer, and Weyl. Part two of this book covers contemporary mathematics, discussing topology and manifolds, categories, and functors, Grothendieck topologies, sheaves, and elementary topoi. Among the theories presented in detail are non-standard analysis, constructive and intuitionist analysis, and smooth infinitesimal analysis/synthetic differential geometry. No other book so thoroughly covers the history and development of the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal.

On August 10, 1632, five leading Jesuits convened in a sombre Roman palazzo to pass judgment on a simple idea: that a continuous line is composed of distinct and limitlessly tiny parts. The doctrine would become the foundation of calculus, but on that fateful day the judges ruled that it was forbidden. With the stroke of a pen they set off a war for the soul of the modern world. Amir Alexander takes us from the bloody religious strife of the sixteenth century to the battlefields of the English civil war and the fierce confrontations between leading thinkers like Galileo and Hobbes. The legitimacy of popes and kings, as well as our modern beliefs in human liberty and progressive science, hung in the balance; the answer hinged on the infinitesimal. Pulsing with drama and excitement, Infinitesimal will forever change the way you look at a simple line.

A rigorous, axiomatically formulated presentation of the 'zero-square', or 'nilpotent' infinitesimal.

Up to now there have been scarcely any publications on Leibniz dedicated to investigating the interrelations between philosophy and mathematics in his thought. In part this is due to the previously restricted textual basis of editions such as those produced by Gerhardt. Through recent volumes of the scientific letters and mathematical papers series of the Academy Edition scholars have obtained a much richer textual basis on which to conduct their studies - material which allows readers to see interconnections between his philosophical and mathematical ideas which have not previously been manifested. The present book draws extensively from this recently published material. The contributors are among the best in their fields. Their commissioned papers cover thematically salient aspects of the various ways in which philosophy and mathematics informed each other in Leibniz's thought.

Gilles Deleuze's engagements with mathematics, replete in his work, rely upon the construction of alternative lineages in the history of mathematics, which challenge some of the self imposed limits that regulate the canonical concepts of the discipline. For Deleuze, these challenges provide an opportunity to reconfigure particular philosophical problems - for example, the problem of individuation - and to develop new concepts in response to them. The highly original research presented in this book explores the mathematical construction of Deleuze's philosophy, as well as addressing the undervalued and often neglected question of the mathematical thinkers who influenced his work. In the wake of Alain Badiou's recent and seemingly devastating attack on the way the relation between mathematics and philosophy is configured in Deleuze's work, Simon B.Duffy offers a robust defence of the structure of Deleuze's philosophy and, in particular, the adequacy of the mathematical problems used in its construction. By reconciling Badiou and Deleuze's seemingly incompatible engagements with mathematics, Duffy succeeds in presenting a solid foundation for Deleuze's philosophy, rebuffing the recent challenges against it.

An analysis of Newton's mathematical work, from early discoveries to mature reflections, and a discussion of Newton's views on the role and nature of mathematics. Historians of mathematics have devoted considerable attention to Isaac Newton's work on algebra, series, fluxions, quadratures, and geometry. In Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method, Niccolò Guicciardini examines a critical aspect of Newton's work that has not been tightly connected to Newton's actual practice: his philosophy of mathematics. Newton aimed to inject certainty into natural philosophy by deploying mathematical reasoning (titling his main work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy most probably to highlight a stark contrast to Descartes's Principles of Philosophy). To that end he paid concerted attention to method, particularly in relation to the issue of certainty, participating in contemporary debates on the subject and elaborating his own answers. Guicciardini shows how Newton carefully positioned himself against two giants in the “common” and “new” analysis, Descartes and Leibniz. Although his work was in many ways disconnected from the traditions of Greek geometry, Newton portrayed himself as antiquity's legitimate heir, thereby distancing himself from the moderns. Guicciardini reconstructs Newton's own method by extracting it from his concrete practice and not solely by examining his broader statements about such matters. He examines the full range of Newton's works, from his early treatises on series and fluxions to the late writings, which were produced in direct opposition to Leibniz. The complex interactions between Newton's understanding of method and his mathematical work then reveal themselves through Guicciardini's careful analysis of selected examples. Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method uncovers what mathematics was for Newton, and what being a mathematician meant to him.

An authorised reissue of the long out of print classic textbook, Advanced Calculus by the late Dr Lynn Loomis and Dr Shlomo Sternberg both of Harvard University has been a revered but hard to find textbook for the advanced calculus course for decades.This book is based on an honors course in advanced calculus that the authors gave in the 1960's. The foundational material, presented in the unstarred sections of Chapters 1 through 11, was normally covered, but different applications of this basic material were stressed from year to year, and the book therefore contains more material than was covered in any one year. It can accordingly be used (with omissions) as a text for a year's course in advanced calculus, or as a text for a three-semester introduction to analysis.The prerequisites are a good grounding in the calculus of one variable from a mathematically rigorous point of view, together with some acquaintance with linear algebra. The reader should be familiar with limit and continuity type arguments and have a certain amount of mathematical sophistication. As possible introductory texts, we mention Differential and Integral Calculus by R Courant, Calculus by T Apostol, Calculus by M Spivak, and Pure Mathematics by G Hardy. The reader should also have some experience with partial derivatives.In overall plan the book divides roughly into a first half which develops the calculus (principally the differential calculus) in the setting of normed vector spaces, and a second half which deals with the calculus of differentiable manifolds.