Raffo Quintana Federico
Centro de Estudios de Filosofía e Historia de la Ciencia (CEFHIC) de la Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (UNQ), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina.
Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2018 Feb;67:65-73. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.12.003. Epub 2018 Feb 3.
In this paper we will try to explain how Leibniz justified the idea of an exact arithmetical quadrature. We will do this by comparing Leibniz's exposition with that of John Wallis. In short, we will show that the idea of exactitude in matters of quadratures relies on two fundamental requisites that, according to Leibniz, the infinite series have, namely, that of regularity and that of completeness. In the first part of this paper, we will go deeper into three main features of Leibniz's method, that is: it is an infinitesimal method, it looks for an arithmetical quadrature and it proposes a result that is not approximate, but exact. After that, we will deal with the requisite of the regularity of the series, pointing out that, unlike the inductive method proposed by Wallis, Leibniz propounded some sort of intellectual recognition of what is invariant in the series. Finally, we will consider the requisite of completeness of the series. We will see that, although both Wallis and Leibniz introduced the supposition of completeness, the German thinker went beyond the English mathematician, since he recognized that it is not necessary to look for a number for the quadrature of the circle, given that we have a series that is equal to the area of that curvilinear figure.
在本文中,我们将尝试解释莱布尼茨是如何为精确算术求积法的概念进行辩护的。我们将通过比较莱布尼茨与约翰·沃利斯的阐述来做到这一点。简而言之,我们将表明,求积问题中的精确性概念依赖于莱布尼茨认为无穷级数所具有的两个基本条件,即规律性条件和完备性条件。在本文的第一部分,我们将更深入地探讨莱布尼茨方法的三个主要特征,即:它是一种无穷小方法,它寻求算术求积法,并且它提出的结果不是近似的,而是精确的。在此之后,我们将讨论级数规律性的条件,指出与沃利斯提出的归纳法不同,莱布尼茨提出了某种对级数中不变量的理智识别。最后,我们将考虑级数完备性的条件。我们将看到,尽管沃利斯和莱布尼茨都引入了完备性的假设,但这位德国思想家超越了这位英国数学家,因为他认识到,鉴于我们有一个等于该曲线图形面积的级数,就不必为圆的求积寻找一个数。