alt Hacker NewsDual numbers are basically big/little O notation. They combine beautifully with Robinson's NSA to give the most 18th century-like approach to deriving integral/derivative formulas that I know. And it's fully rigorous!
Dual numbers are basically big/little O notation. They combine beautifully with Robinson's NSA to give the most 18th century-like approach to deriving integral/derivative formulas that I know. And it's fully rigorous!
True. Knuth had a paper where he suggests using (a slightly modified) O notation for teaching calculus.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/calc
From the Arxiv paper:
> Students have to memorize a diversity of processes for essentially performing the same task.
Is that true for differentiation ? I don't recall having to memorize many things, just how differentiation composes over +,-,×,÷, function composition and the differential of a few standard forms.
Symbolic integration, on the other hand, is a whole can of worms.