INFINITESIMAL

Infinitesimal

Infinitesimals have been used to express the idea of objects so small that there is no way to see them or to measure them. The insight with exploiting infinitesimals was that objects could still retain certain specific properties, such as angle or slope, even though these objects were quantitatively small. The word infinitesimal comes from a 17th-century Modern Latin coinage infinitesimus, which originally referred to the "infinite-th" item in a sequence. It was originally introduced around 1670 by either Nicolaus Mercator or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

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infinitesimal

Noun

  1. A non-zero quantity whose magnitude is smaller than any positive number (by definition it is not a real number).

Adjective

  1. Incalculably, exceedingly, or immeasurably minute; vanishingly small.
    Do you ever get the feeling that you are but an infinitesimal speck, swallowed by the vastness of the universe and beyond?
  2. Of or pertaining to values that approach zero as a limit.
  3. Very small.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: infinitesimal
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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