I didn’t know Marx was into math, apparently he taught himself quite a bit just as a hobby, including working out some higher algebra. Neat!
Good article. I never saw any problem with how Marx reasoned through calculus as it was obviously an informal explanation. Uninitiated and malicious observers who have not otherwise read Marx will miss the dialectical approach he took in understanding the subject.
Qualitative analysis, critique of categories was always the larger concern for Marx. Given stable and correct categories, the quantitative answer is trivial to find (by this I mean not necessarily easy, but following directly from the question). But so shoddy was the theoretical basis in political economy that he had to theorize extensively to correct it.
Marx hated calculus, which is why he never talked about the rate of anything or it’s tendencies to go in a particular direction
Setting variables to 0 was something I remember doing during Calc 1. Like, with guidance of the teacher/book. Just to see what would happen or reason about it, etc. (Technically doing more limit -> 0 stuff, but functionally the same.)
So kinda funny to do the equivilant of finding my notebook from that class and saying “hm yes, these private notes of a math student dicking around aren’t completely 100% correct. Therefore they must know no math.”
What’s more important is how you interpret all those “Divisions by zero”. Some were valid, but others failed. Sometimes you CAN figure out what n/0 means. Like, even if the actual value is undefined, you can reason “it would be X if it didn’t go off to infinity”. (Think about a graph that gets close to 0 but never reaches it for example. If infinity were a number, then the function would = 0 at that place. Asymptotes if you can recall that concept.) Sometimes it behaves badly and you can’t pick a value it’d get to.
Its neat because the first part of the class is saying we only work with well defined functions with a lot of rules, and then at the end you get to break some of those rules and see why you have them for the basics.
Calc 1 is great btw. Should be a required class (maybe without ALL of the proofs). Sucks 99% of professors make calc 2 a failure pit.
Also super interesting/funny to hear that the English were still so bitter about Leibnitz like 150 years later that they were behind continental math progress. Leibnitz notation stays winning, suck it Newton.
