Teaching Analysis by its History

Il conferenziere è autore, insieme a Ernst Hairer, del testo "L'analyse au fil de l'histoire", tradotto in inglese col titolo "Analysis by Its History". Si tratta di un testo per un primo corso di analisi in cui i concetti vengono illustrati insieme alla storia della loro scoperta. Egli giustifica come segue il suo interesse in questo argomento. I never liked the dust-dry Bourbaki-style instruction Def.-Thm.-Proof (Germans call it the Landau-style, Greeks may call it the Euclid-style). After years-long experiences of teaching I got more and more convinced that it is not at all suited for first-year courses, in particular for students whose main direction was physics, computer science or chemistry. I am not the first with this opinion; emphasizing the history for understanding the development of mathematics, its motivations, its difficulties to overcome, its contacts to neighboring disciplines, was normal in earlier times (for example for Pappus, Wallis, Barrow, Euler, Lacroix, Dirichlet, Felix Klein, Toeplitz).