alt Hacker NewsMy point is that as a practical tool to simplify calculations, i see no value in NSA.
The specific infinite results you get depend on the representative you choose and if you want to calculate integrals which you have yet to define, you need to work harder. On the other hand, if you care about modeling specific infinities for applications you are very likely also someone who needs and wants the actual theory.
As someone with mathematical background indeed i repeat that i think this theory is interesting and worth studying. Just not that it simplifies anything.
Yeah, you make some good points. I think at the end of the day both can work - anything you can do in the standard analysis setting can in principle be done in NSA too by the transfer theorem, it's just less travelled ground and maybe the requisite techniques aren't as well known.
Integration is very similar, by the way - you just do Riemann sums with a hyperfinite number of partitions of infinitesmal width. It sounds weird, and it is, but it makes it very easy to understand why integrating f(x) against a delta function gives you f(0), for instance, without having to justify it with limits or a bunch of deeper theory.