History
Although implicit in the development of calculus of the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern idea of the limit of a function goes back to Bolzano who, in 1817, introduced the basics of the epsilon-delta technique to define continuous functions. However, his work was not known during his lifetime (Felscher 2000). Cauchy discussed limits in his Cours d'analyse (1821) and gave essentially the modern definition, but this is not often recognized because he only gave a verbal definition (Grabiner 1983). Weierstrass first introduced the epsilon-delta definition of limit in the form it is usually written today. He also introduced the notations lim and limx→x0 (Burton 1997).
The modern notation of placing the arrow below the limit symbol is due to Hardy in his book A Course of Pure Mathematics in 1908 (Miller 2004).
Read more about this topic: Limit Of A Function
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune,
Then spur away o’er empires and o’er states,
Leaving at last not much besides chronology,
Excepting the post-obits of theology.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)