Related papers: Commuting and noncommuting infinitesimals
We examine the classical/intuitionist divide, and how it reflects on modern theories of infinitesimals. When leading intuitionist Heyting announced that "the creation of non-standard analysis is a standard model of important mathematical…
In 1931 Elie Cartan constructed a geometry which was rarely considered. Cartan proposed a way to define an infinitesimal metric $ds$ starting from a variational problem on hypersurfaces in an $n$-dimensional manifold $\mathcal{M}$. This…
We examine prevailing philosophical and historical views about the origin of infinitesimal mathematics in light of modern infinitesimal theories, and show the works of Fermat, Leibniz, Euler, Cauchy and other giants of infinitesimal…
In the realm of conformal geometry, we give a classification of the Euclidean hypersurfaces that admit a non-trivial conformal infinitesimal variation. In the restricted case of conformal variations, such a classification was obtained by E.…
Leibniz used the term fiction in conjunction with infinitesimals. What kind of fictions they were exactly is a subject of scholarly dispute. The position of Bos and Mancosu contrasts with that of Ishiguro and Arthur. Leibniz's own views,…
In the history of infinitesimal calculus, we trace innovation from Leibniz to Cauchy and reaction from Berkeley to Mansion and beyond. We explore 19th century infinitesimal lores, including the approaches of Simeon-Denis Poisson,…
The ring of fluxions (real sequential germs at infinity) provides a rigorous approach to infinitesimals, different from the better-known approach of Abraham Robinson. The basic idea was first espoused in a paper by Curt Schmieden and Detlof…
In this paper we offer a reconstruction of the evolution of Leibniz's thought concerning the problem of the infinite divisibility of bodies, the tension between actuality, unassignability and syncategorematicity, and the closely related…
Quantum groups emerged in the latter quarter of the 20th century as, on the one hand, a deep and natural generalisation of symmetry groups for certain integrable systems, and on the other as part of a generalisation of geometry itself…
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…
The way Leibniz applied his philosophy to mathematics has been the subject of longstanding debates. A key piece of evidence is his letter to Masson on bodies. We offer an interpretation of this often misunderstood text, dealing with the…
Looking to the history of mathematics one could find out two outer approaches to Geometry. First one (algebraic) is due to Descartes and second one (group-theoretic)--to Klein. We will see that they are not rivalling but are tied (by…
Noncommutative geometry, in its many incarnations, appears at the crossroad of various researches in theoretical and mathematical physics: from models of quantum space-time (with or without breaking of Lorentz symmetry) to loop gravity and…
We explore the issue of providing a foundational framework for Leibnizian infinitesimals in the light of modern standard and nonstandard approaches. We outline a trichotomy of ordinals, cardinals and ringinals as a historiographic tool. A…
A new mathematics, the constructive one, characterizes a singular limit as undecidable. Hence, a singular limit between two theories actually represents a difference between two different kinds of mathematics. This particular situation…
It often goes unnoticed that, even for a finite number of degrees of freedom, the canonical commutation relations have many inequivalent irreducible unitary representations; the free particle and a particle in a box provide examples that…
Mathematical concepts and results have often been given a long history, stretching far back in time. Yet recent work in the history of mathematics has tended to focus on local topics, over a short term-scale, and on the study of ephemeral…
This is an introduction to an algebraic construction of a gravity theory on noncommutative spaces which is based on a deformed algebra of (infinitesimal) diffeomorphisms. We start with some fundamental ideas and concepts of noncommutative…
This paper is a very brief and gentle introduction to non-commutative geometry geared primarily towards physicists and geometers. It starts with a brief historical description of the motivation for non-commutative geometry and then goes on…
Quantum groups and quantum homogeneous spaces - developed by several authors since the 80's - provide a large class of examples of algebras which for many reasons we interpret as `coordinate algebras' over noncommutative spaces. This…