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From: Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: (ReacTor) Defining Our Terms: What Do We Mean by "Hard SF"?
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:20:55 -0700
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On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 10:13:10 -0700, The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca>
wrote:

>On Mon, 19 Aug 2024 20:54:58 -0400, Joy Beeson
><jbeeson@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>
>>One of the commenters mentioned that he never got the hang of
>>calculus.
>>
>>I got first-semester calculus fine, and I got second-semester calculus
>>fine (both faded away during the intervening six decades), but
>>calculus itself I never got.
>>
>>Many years later, I learned that this was because my teachers not only
>>didn't explain the fundamental thereom to me, they didn't even tell me
>>that calculus *had* a fundamental thereom.
>
>Oy veh! I got that in 2nd year though back in elementary school we got
>a glimmer of that trying to "prove" the area of a circle was pi * r
>squared by counting progressively small squares (mostly where the
>circle went through including those where the line went through versus
>those where the squares were outside the circle vs inside which
>demonstrated the area of the circle had to be between those two limits
>- and having to do it 2 or 3 times with progressively smaller squares
>- we had to do 3 or 4 iterations of this)

Archimedes computed pi by using inscribed/circumscribed polygons. This
is the sort of thing that led to the discovery (or, better perhaps,
conceptualization) of limits.
--=20
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"