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hmemcpy / milewski-ctfp-pdf

Bartosz Milewski's 'Category Theory for Programmers' unofficial PDF and LaTeX source
https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface/
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Erronous claims about Dirac in the Preface #175

Open no-identd opened 5 years ago

no-identd commented 5 years ago

Time for a History of Mathematics lesson with one of it's most notorious debunkers, Mikhail G. Katz:

https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/staff/David.Tall/pdfs/dot2010x-katz-cauchydirac.pdf

Quoting a small part from it:

"This remark is a reflection of a pervasive myth, to the effect that the physicists invented the delta function, and the theory of distributions legalized them after the fact many years later."

While this talks about something Bunge remarked, it applies to part of the Preface as well.

Sorry! But: I have a suggestion for coming up with a replacement remark, check here:

http://math.andrej.com/2008/08/13/intuitionistic-mathematics-for-physics/

no-identd commented 4 years ago

Bump

BartoszMilewski commented 4 years ago

It seems like the link to Tall's work doesn't work, but I was able to find his article. I'm not convinced, though. Cauchy might have anticipated the Dirac delta function, but he couldn't have made it rigorous. This had to wait until the work of Schwartz and Sobolev on the theory of distributions.