Mathematical analysis, which mathematicians refer to simply as analysis, has its beginnings in the rigorous formulation of infinitesimal calculus. It is a branch of pure mathematics that includes the theories of differentiation, integration and measure, limits, infinite series,[1] and analytic functions. These theories are often studied in the context of real numbers, complex numbers, and real and complex functions. Analysis may be conventionally distinguished from geometry. However, theories of analysis can be applied to any space of mathematical objects that has a definition of nearness (a topological space) or, more specifically, distance (a metric space).
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Early results in analysis were implicitly present in the early days of ancient Greek mathematics. For instance, an infinite geometric sum is implicit in Zeno's paradox of the dichotomy.[2] Later, Greek mathematicians such as Eudoxus and Archimedes made more explicit, but informal, use of the concepts of limits and convergence when they used the method of exhaustion to compute the area and volume of regions and solids.[3] In India, the 12th century mathematician Bhāskara II gave examples of the derivative and used what is now known as Rolle's theorem.
In the 14th century, Madhava of Sangamagrama developed infinite series expansions, like the power series and the Taylor series, of functions such as sine, cosine, tangent and arctangent. Alongside his development of the Taylor series of the trigonometric functions, he also estimated the magnitude of the error terms created by truncating these series and gave a rational approximation of an infinite series. His followers at the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics further expanded his works, up to the 16th century.
In Europe, during the later half of the 17th century, Newton and Leibniz independently developed infinitesimal calculus, which grew, with the stimulus of applied work that continued through the 18th century, into analysis topics such as the calculus of variations, ordinary and partial differential equations, Fourier analysis, and generating functions. During this period, calculus techniques were applied to approximate discrete problems by continuous ones.
In the 18th century, Euler introduced the notion of mathematical function.[4] Real analysis began to emerge as an independent subject when Bernard Bolzano introduced the modern definition of continuity in 1816.[5] but Bolzano's work did not become widely known until the 1870s. In 1821, Cauchy began to put calculus on a firm logical foundation by rejecting the principle of the generality of algebra widely used in earlier work, particularly by Euler. Instead, Cauchy formulated calculus in terms of geometric ideas and infinitesimals. Thus, his definition of continuity required an infinitesimal change in x to correspond to an infinitesimal change in y. He also introduced the concept of the Cauchy sequence, and started the formal theory of complex analysis. Poisson, Liouville, Fourier and others studied partial differential equations and harmonic analysis. The contributions of these mathematicians and others, such as Weierstrass, developed the (ε, δ)-definition of limit approach, thus founding the modern field of mathematical analysis.
In the middle of the century Riemann introduced his theory of integration. The last third of the 19th century saw the arithmetization of analysis by Weierstrass, who thought that geometric reasoning was inherently misleading, and introduced the "epsilon-delta" definition of limit. Then, mathematicians started worrying that they were assuming the existence of a continuum of real numbers without proof. Dedekind then constructed the real numbers by Dedekind cuts, in which irrational numbers are formally defined, which serve to fill the "gaps" between rational numbers, thereby creating a complete set: the continuum of real numbers, which had already been developed by Simon Stevin in terms of decimal expansions. Around that time, the attempts to refine the theorems of Riemann integration led to the study of the "size" of the set of discontinuities of real functions.
Also, "monsters" (nowhere continuous functions, continuous but nowhere differentiable functions, space-filling curves) began to be created. In this context, Jordan developed his theory of measure, Cantor developed what is now called naive set theory, and Baire proved the Baire category theorem. In the early 20th century, calculus was formalized using an axiomatic set theory. Lebesgue solved the problem of measure, and Hilbert introduced Hilbert spaces to solve integral equations. The idea of normed vector space was in the air, and in the 1920s Banach created functional analysis.
Mathematical analysis includes the following subfields.
Classical analysis would normally be understood as any work not using functional analysis techniques, and is sometimes also called hard analysis; it also naturally refers to the more traditional topics. The study of differential equations is now shared with other fields such as dynamical systems theory, though the overlap with conventional analysis is large.
Techniques from analysis are also found in other areas such as:
The motivation for studying mathematical analysis in the wider context of topological or metric spaces is threefold:
As the above section on topological spaces makes clear, analysis isn't just about continuity in the traditional sense of real numbers. Analysis is fundamentally about functions, the spaces that the functions act on and the function spaces that the functions themselves are members of. A discrete function f(n) is usually called a sequence a(n). A sequence could be a finite sequence from some data source or an infinite sequence from a discrete dynamical system. A discrete function could be defined explicitly by a list, or by a formula for f(n) or it could be given implicitly by a recurrence relation or difference equation. A difference equation is the discrete equivalent of a differential equation and can be used to approximate the latter or studied in its own right. Every question and method about differential equations has a discrete equivalent for difference equations. For instance where there are integral transforms in harmonic analysis for studying continuous functions or analog signals, there are discrete transforms for discrete functions or digital signals. As well as the discrete metric there are more general discrete or finite metric spaces and finite topological spaces.
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