Fermat, Leibniz, Euler, and the gang: The true history of the concepts of limit and shadow

Abstract

Fermat, Leibniz, Euler, and Cauchy all used one or another form of approximate equality, or the idea of discarding "negligible" terms, so as to obtain a correct analytic answer. Their inferential moves find suitable proxies in the context of modern theories of infinitesimals, and specifically the concept of shadow. We give an application to decreasing rearrangements of real functions.

35 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Notices of the American Mathematical Society 61 (2014), no. 8