Re: Gabriel's AFD - Thread 8th March 2005

From: Jason (logamath_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/12/05 

Date: 12 Mar 2005 08:15:12 -0800

> Then you've never read a calculus book.

Whatever.

> Nobody has been able to get you to concede anything. It doesn't
> follow that nobody's shown anything - I showed the theorem is...

How can I concede to anything which is not mathematical? Most of the
posts contain
more inflamatory comments than anything which remotely resembles
mathematics.

> Uh, no. Nobody else here is confused about constants being
> differentiable.

I am not confused about this at all. If you read my post correctly,
what I tried to say was that it did not make sense to think of a
constant function such as f(x) = c as being differentiable. Even though
you obtain *zero* using the classic definition, it still makes no
sense! Have you thought about what happens when you integrate *zero*?
You get some constant whose value you do not know! How can you not see
this?! Evidently, the ftoc does not work in reverse for a function
which is constant. In my opinion is is non-sense to say such a function
is differentiable just as much as it is non-sense to say that the
tangent to a straight line is the straight line itself! You read
whatever you want to read and interpret it the way you think is
correct. However, the way you interpret is is not necessarily correct!

> Also nobody else thinks it makes sense to ask whether a proof
containing undefined
> terms is correct.

I was asking you to help me make sense of it. It is an undefined term
but the working
of the proof is very appealing and simple. Just because you cannot make
any sense of it, does not mean it is untrue.

>> Actually I was the first person to post a counterexample. Not that
>> that's any big deal, it's not hard to see what sort of construction
>> to try.

Again, I do not remember any counter-example. If you want to take this
off-line, I would be glad to do so. I am not prepared to sift through
screeds of *** (mostly uncivil and
idiotic comments directed at a person's character rather than the
mathematics).

Jason Wells

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