Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
And have done so at least since my freshman maths classes, forty years ago.
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Oh, it's a much older debate than that, with mathematicians in the 17th and 18th centuries objecting strongly to the lack of rigor of infinitesimal arguments, rigorizing many of them is one of the things Cauchy is famous for (in 1821).
It's now possible to state most of these things rigorously and still use concepts of infinity and infinitesimals, but sometimes in ways that differ from the way you'd use them intuitively.