Volume 46, Number 9 · May 20, 1999
Infinitesimally Yours
By Jim Holt
Reasoning with the Infinite: From the Closed World to the Mathematical Universe
by Michel Blay, Translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise
University of Chicago Press, 216 pp., $30.00
The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought
by William R. Everdell
University of Chicago Press, 501 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Abraham Robinson: The Creation of Nonstandard Analysis, a Personal and Mathematical Odyssey
by Joseph Warren Dauben
Princeton University Press, 559 pp., $21.95 (paper)
Non-standard Analysis
by Abraham Robinson
Princeton University Press, 293 pp., $21.95 (paper)
When people talk about 'the infinite,' they usually mean the infinitely great: inconceivable vastness, world without end, boundless power, the Absolute. There is, however, another kind of infinity that is quite different from these, though just as marvelous in its own way. That is the infinitely small, or the infinitesimal.
Review, 5736 words
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