Somehow ATD-related, he sez...

[Mark Kohut]

Sounds fascinating, no? NO??.....love that 'dangerous"...
 
“Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World” (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Amir Alexander, out April 8th. The paradoxical idea of infinitesimal quantities preoccupied ancient Greek mathematicians, especially Archimedes, who used the concept to calculate volumes of circles, cylinders, and spheres. But the mathematical mysteries the idea presented were largely ignored until the fifteen-hundreds, when the problem of the infinitesimal became a source of philosophical dispute. In his new book, Alexander, a professor of history at U.C.L.A., explains how the mathematical debate was a battle over differing visions for modern Europe, between those who sought to protect the status quo and those who embraced progress and reform. The divide was most pronounced in Italy, where the Jesuits opposed Galileo’s ideas about infinity, and in Interregnum England, where a “drawn-out gladiatorial fight” took place
 between Thomas Hobbes and the mathematician John Wallis. Alexander writes that “the infinitely small was a simple idea that punctured a great and beautiful dream: that … all things, natural and human, have their given and unchanging place in the grand universal order.”—R.A. 
 
As I tentatively essayed in my solo read of AtD : one (major) slant of the maths stuff in that book concerns what is
"natural and human...w perhaps a given and unchanging place in the grand universal order" and
What is Not.  maybe. 
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