Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While we're at it, it's probably not the best idea to represent derivatives as fractions either (for the sake of notational consistency). Do you mean dy/dx? Why isn't that a good idea? Isn't fractional form useful, for example solving differential equation y = dy/dx => dy/y = dx? What are the alternative you'd prefer: prime notation, D-notation, or else?
I don't know about the person you're responding to, but those operations over what usually appears at the denominator of the derivative purely for notation purpose has always looked to me as complete magical garbage. What object is "dx" ? is it a number ? a limit ? is it zero ? can i divide another number by it ? I think this notation is single handly the reason why i've never been comfortable with calculus. PS: i've…
On Leibniz Notation
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Re: On Leibniz Notation
#12The idea that the letter choice shouldn't matter fully makes sense to me. And in general, point free notation can be nice (point free meaning operating on the function rather than introducing an arbitrary point and operating on the function evaluated at the arbitrary point. Despite this, I still believe Leibniz notation is superior for multi-argument functions. For multi argument functions, named arguments are much c…
If we did have real named arguments like f(a=x(t), b=t), where a and b are fixed by the definition of f rather than arbitrary names to be made up on each invocation, then maybe it would make sense to write something like (∂f/∂a)(a=x(t), b=t). Though that’s still pretty far from Leibniz notation, where ∂f/∂a is somehow supposed to be a numerical value depending on a, not a function to which arguments must be supplied.
But what I think is really lacking in mathematical notation is explicit lambda abstraction: we should be able to write
(λt. f(x(t), t))'(t) = (λa. f(a, t))'(x(t)) x'(t) + (λb. f(x(t), b))'(t),
which reuses the ordinary one-variable derivative and has none of these ambiguities.
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While we're at it, it's probably not the best idea to represent derivatives as fractions either (for the sake of notational consistency). Do you mean dy/dx? Why isn't that a good idea? Isn't fractional form useful, for example solving differential equation y = dy/dx => dy/y = dx? What are the alternative you'd prefer: prime notation, D-notation, or else?
I don't know about the person you're responding to, but those operations over what usually appears at the denominator of the derivative purely for notation purpose has always looked to me as complete magical garbage. What object is "dx" ? is it a number ? a limit ? is it zero ? can i divide another number by it ? I think this notation is single handly the reason why i've never been comfortable with calculus. PS: i've…
To measure the speed of a moving object you must divide the distance moved by the time it took to move that distance.
So how can you measure what the speed is at a given location? In a sense you cannot, you can only measure it at a given interval over the period of time it took to move that distance.
So it is kind of confusing. dx/dy represents the limit of measuring the speed over increasingly small distances and durations around a given point in space and time. If you take dx to 0 and dy to 0 it does not make sense because 0/0 is ill-defined. Therefore we need some notation that implies we are really not talking about a single point, but an increasingly small distance, and duration.
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#14Briefly, the way you make sense of this is by being consistent with notation and being aware of definitions. f is a function. f(x) is not a function. f(x) is an element of the range. Unfortunately, I'm sure growing up your teachers probably referred to f(x) as being the function. If you just simplify the function composition and clearly label objects, I'm pretty sure you won't have this kind of confusion. It really s…
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#15I agree with this part. I think in teaching, the precise notation should be taught first and everyone should understand it well. But later on, it will make communication and even just doing calculations easier if you can accept the imprecise notation, use it and translate it into something clearer when needed. This is particularly handy in e.g. differential equations where sloppy notation makes certain manipulations a bit easier.
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While we're at it, it's probably not the best idea to represent derivatives as fractions either (for the sake of notational consistency). Do you mean dy/dx? Why isn't that a good idea? Isn't fractional form useful, for example solving differential equation y = dy/dx => dy/y = dx? What are the alternative you'd prefer: prime notation, D-notation, or else?
I don't know about the person you're responding to, but those operations over what usually appears at the denominator of the derivative purely for notation purpose has always looked to me as complete magical garbage. What object is "dx" ? is it a number ? a limit ? is it zero ? can i divide another number by it ? I think this notation is single handly the reason why i've never been comfortable with calculus. PS: i've…
You will be delighted to discover that they are in fact not magical or garbage.
> What object is "dx" ? is it a number ? a limit ? is it zero ? can i divide another number by it ?
dx is a differential one-form. You can think of it as a generalisation of a gradient, if you like. These are very important in Differential Geometry.
You can use differential forms to do all sorts of things, but one example you may be familiar with is to compute area or volume forms over arbitrary manifolds. It gets a bit hard to define things on HN without TeX support, but using differential one-forms and the related exterior derivative, you can define a generalised Stokes' theorem that works for any smooth, oriented manifold.
I used this in my PhD, and implemented it directly in a numerical method, so this has very practical engineering uses also.
"Elementary Differential Geometry" by Barrett O'Neill is a pretty beginner-friendly introduction to some of these topics if you're interested, though there are many other good texts also.
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#17I appreciate that especially for mathematicians and programmers, making a clean distinction between a function and its evaluation is a key conceptual point, and Leibniz notation obscures this fact. However, there are good reasons why physicists use Leibniz notation, and this answer really glosses over that.
The reason is that the particularities of the mathematical structures used to model a physical problem matter a lot less than the relationships between the actual physical underlying quantities. And there can be a lot of them. The answer evokes thermodynamics, and I couldn't think of a better example. Are we really to introduce a distinct symbol for _every_ possible functional relation between _every_ state variable? If I have T = f(P, V) and P = g(T, S), do I need to remember in which position exactly each function has been ordered before I can write down "how P varies with T when S is fixed"?
Leibniz notation, although formally tricksy, is just the best tool for communicating the _intent_ of a physical relationship without getting bogged down in the mathematically detail. The purpose of an equation is to express that relationship to the reader. Think if it like code — is it so bad if my code does a bit of magic behind the scenes to allow for a clearer reading, even if the semantics aren't immediately obvious? Well, ultimately, it depends on the situation, and a balance must be reached. I don't believe that expressing everything the way TFA suggests is striking the right balance.
Notational abuse happens all the time in physics, and this is certainly not the most egregious example. Just compare it to the path integral. It's easy to assume that this is because of a lack of sophistication or rigour by physicists. (Certainly I did throughout my physics education, being more mathematically or pedantically inclined.) But it's a simplistic view.
Now, while I'll defend the usage of these sort of unrigorous conventions even if they are strictly speaking meaningless mathematically, what I won't defend is the slapdash approach that is often used to _teach_ partial derivatives to physicists. Some exposure to concepts like distinguishing real variables/quantities from functions is needed, or, as TFA does mention at the end, the student won't be able to unpack the notational convenience into clear semantics, which can lead to unclear reasoning. I used to share the views of the author for a period when first introduced to Leibniz partial derivative notation in my first thermodynamics course, and, probably like them, found it to be totally incomprehensible symbol soup. But for myself, I see now that it was mostly a failure of teaching rather than a failure of the notation itself.
I'll add one last thought. There is a degree of "primitive obsession" at work here, trying to fit everything into positional functions and real numbers. I have thought that a formalism that better reflects the structure of "physical quantity" (as opposed to thinking of them as plain real numbers) may help bridge the gap between rigour and conceptual convenience. The tools are really already there. We need two key concepts: first, borrow from programming the idea of keyword arguments (there is a book which sadly I can't remember the name of which does as much to formalize Einstein notation for tensors in a coordinate-free way); second, to model quantities not as real numbers but as differentiable homomorphisms from a state space (modeled as a manifold in a coordinate-free way) to the reals. This is how physicists already think about it, it needs only be formalised.
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While we're at it, it's probably not the best idea to represent derivatives as fractions either (for the sake of notational consistency). Do you mean dy/dx? Why isn't that a good idea? Isn't fractional form useful, for example solving differential equation y = dy/dx => dy/y = dx? What are the alternative you'd prefer: prime notation, D-notation, or else?
The answer to this question is answered in the FA. Leibiz notation is confusing except in the most simple cases. For example: > Isn't fractional form useful, for example solving differential equation y = dy/dx => dy/y = dx? What exactly does "dy/y = dx" mean? What is on the LHS and what is on the RHS? It acts like a mnemonic scribble for an intermediate step. It doesn't have any mathematical meaning.
As I understand, dy/y = dx means that the derivative of 1/y with respect to y equals to the derivative of 1 with respect to x.
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#19This looks like the difference between parameters of a function and arguments. In the definition, you have the parameter x, used internaly and, when calling the function you use an argument - located in the calling context. In python: def f(x): return 2*x ## x is a parameter x = 3 y = f(x) # x in an argument
For partial derivatives, it may be ok to use 1 and 2 to show they are the first and second parameter, but maybe they could also be named by some convention, like x and y or alpha and beta or whatever
Re: On Leibniz Notation
#20Clearly, Leibniz notation does not intrinsically contain any deep insights since at one point Leibniz himself was erroneously induced by it to think that d(xy)= d(x)d(y), which is false. Newton on the other hand thought in terms of simple geometric concepts (areas), which make it crystal clear that d(xy) = x d(y) + y d(x).
On the topic of history of early analysis I cannot recommend enough this collection of anecdotes from Arnold: