![]() ![]() If you are interested and curious - and it sounds like you are - you will eventually learn how to construct differentials on a rigorous basis. But you really don't need to know the construction in order to learn the rules.īottom line: It would have been crazy to wait until you had an explanation at that level before you started doing rational number arithmetic. It's important to know that such a construction exists, because that's what assures that the rules you've been using won't lead to a contradiction. Much later on, if you were interested, you asked someone "What is a rational number?" and maybe you got an explanation like the one I just gave you. All you needed to know were the rules for manipulating them. So, nobody ever thinks about the rational number 2/3 as a set of ordered pairs, even though, by the above account, that's what it "is".ĭifferentials are just like that, except that the construction is considerably more complicated than the construction of rational numbers.īut you started working with rational numbers back in elementary school, long before you knew about how to construct them. Now that we know that, we can stop thinking about all that structure and just operate with the rules. We've found a structure that obeys all the "rational number" rules, so we know that the rational numbers exist. Then they check that the definition makes sense - for example, if $a/b=e/f$, then $a/b+c/d$ had better equal $e/f+c/d$, so they check this and a bunch of other properties. For example, they define $a/b + c/d$ to equal $(ad+bc)/bd$ (remembering that each of these expressions stands for a set of ordered pairs. Then they describe addition and multiplication of equivalence classes in terms of the underlying ordered pairs. Then they define a rational number $a/b$ to be the equivalence class of the ordered pair $(a,b)$, where $a$ is any integer and $b$ is any non-zero integer. Then they define an equivalence class to be any set of ordered pairs, all of which are equivalent to each other, and none of which is equivalent to anything outside that set. ![]() Then they define two ordered pairs $(a,b)$ and $(c,d)$ to be equivalent if $ad=bc$. So mathematicians solve that problem as follows: First they define ordered pairs of integers. ![]() Now in order for that to make sense, we have to know that there's at least one thing that obeys those rules. The answer is: They are anything that obeys those rules. ![]() Then you ask me "But what are the rational numbers?" Suppose I teach you all the rules for adding and multiplying rational numbers. Let me explain this by way of an analogy. The right question is not "What is a differential?" but "How do differentials behave?". Thereby meaning the linear approximation: $\ h\longmapsto f'(x_0) h\ $ of $\ h\longmapsto f(x_0+h)-f(x_0)$. It is the linear map $h\longmapsto l(h)$ that we call the differential of $f$ at $x_0$ and denote $\mathrm d\mkern 1mu f_=f'(x_0)\,\mathrm d\mkern 1mu x$$ Specifically, among the linear functions $l$ that take the value $f(x_0)$ at $x_0$, there exists at most one such that, in a neighbourhood of $x_0$, we have: The differential of a function $f$ at $x_0$ is simply the linear function which produces the best linear approximation of $f(x)$ in a neighbourhood of $x_0$. ![]()
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