this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Linguistics Humor

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(Inspired by Reddit post of the last month)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I get the feeling you haven't solved many.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What a curious and needlessly judgmental reply!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

No judgement, but you should know it's not that simple. You can't just pull out your calculator and add together an uncountably infinite collection of values one-by-one.

I mean, you could add together a finite subset of the values, which turns out to be the only practical way fairly often because a symbolic solution is too hard to find. You don't get the actual answer that way, though, just an approximation.

The actual symbolic approaches to integrals are very algebra-heavy and they often require more than one whiteboard to solve by hand. Blackpenredpen "math for fun" on YouTube if you want to see it done at peak performance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean they're right, Leibniz used a modified s for summa, sum. And an integral is just a sum, an infinite sum over infinitesimal summands, but a sum nevertheless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yes, they are right about that being the general concept. I only take issue with the implication that it's equally simple.