An Interest In:
Web News this Week
- March 29, 2024
- March 28, 2024
- March 27, 2024
- March 26, 2024
- March 25, 2024
- March 24, 2024
- March 23, 2024
Some of Our Sources
- BoingBoing
- Mashable
- Just Creative
- Six Revisions
- Abduzeedo
- TutsPlus - Design
- My Ink Blog
- Spyre Studios
- The Verge
- TechPowerUp
Help Webnuz
Referal links:
April 10, 2019 10:58 pm
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/TSjh9bnA9bk/old-school-slashdotter-discovers-and-solves-longstanding-flaw-in-basic-calculus
Old-School Slashdotter Discovers and Solves Longstanding Flaw In Basic Calculus
Longtime Slashdot reader johnnyb (Jonathan Bartlett) shares the findings of a new study he, along with co-author Asatur Zh. Khurshudyan, published this week in the journal DCDIS-A: Recently a longstanding flaw in elementary calculus was found and corrected. The "second derivative" has a notation that has confused many students. It turns out that part of the confusion is because the notation is wrong. Note -- I am the subject of the article. Mind Matters provides the technical details: "[T]he second derivative of y with respect to x has traditionally had the notation 'd2 y/dx 2.' While this notation is expressed as a fraction, the problem is that it doesn't actually work as a fraction. The problem is well-known but it has been generally assumed that there is no way to express the second derivative in fraction form. It has been thought that differentials (the fundamental 'dy' and 'dx' that calculus works with) were not actual values and therefore they aren't actually in ratio with each other. Because of these underlying assumptions, the fact that you could not treat the second derivative as a fraction was not thought to be an anomaly. However, it turns out that, with minor modifications to the notation, the terms of the second derivative (and higher derivatives) can indeed be manipulated as an algebraic fraction. The revised notation for the second derivative is '(d 2 y/dx 2) - (dy/dx)(d 2 x/dx 2).'" The report adds that while mathematicians haven't been getting wrong answers, "correcting the notation enables mathematicians to work with fewer special-case formulas and also to develop a more intuitive understanding of the nature of differentials."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/TSjh9bnA9bk/old-school-slashdotter-discovers-and-solves-longstanding-flaw-in-basic-calculus
Share this article:
Tweet
View Full Article
Slashdot
Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..More About this Source Visit Slashdot