Contemporary Infinitesimalist Theories of Continua and their late 19th- and early 20th-century forerunners

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a historical overview of some of the contemporary infinitesimalist alternatives to the Cantor-Dedekind theory of continua. Among the theories we will consider are those that emerge from nonstandard analysis, nilpotent infinitesimalist approaches to portions of differential geometry and the theory of surreal numbers. Since these theories have roots in the algebraic, geometric and analytic infinitesimalist theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will also provide overviews of the latter theories and some of their relations to the contemporary ones.

References in corpus (5)

• Leibniz's Infinitesimals: Their Fictionality, Their Modern Implementations, And Their Foes From Berkeley To Russell And Beyond
• Who Gave you the Cauchy-Weierstrass Tale? The Dual History of Rigorous Calculus
• Ten Misconceptions from the History of Analysis and Their Debunking
• Approaches to analysis with infinitesimals following Robinson, Nelson, and others
• Analysis on Surreal Numbers