W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (1912)
“

His [Lagrange's] lectures on differential calculus form the basis of his Theorie des fonctions analytiques which was published in 1797. ...its object is to substitute for the differential calculus a group of theorems based upon the development of algebraic functions in series. A somewhat similar method had been previously used by John Landen in his Residual Analysis... Lagrange believed that he could... get rid of those difficulties, connected with the use of infinitely large and infinitely small quantities, to which philosophers objected in the usual treatment of the differential calculus. ...Another treatise in the same lines was his Leçons sur le calcul des fonctions, issued in 1804. These works may be considered as the starting-point for the researches of Cauchy, Jacobi, and Weierstrass.

— W. W. Rouse Ball

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "His [Lagrange's] lectures on differential calculus form the basis of his Theorie des fonctions analytiques which was published in 1797. ...its object is to substitute for the differential calculus a group of theorems based upon the development of algebraic functions in series. A somewhat similar method had been previously used by John Landen in his Residual Analysis... Lagrange believed that he could... get rid of those difficulties, connected with the use of infinitely large and infinitely small quantities, to which philosophers objected in the usual treatment of the differential calculus. ...Another treatise in the same lines was his Leçons sur le calcul des fonctions, issued in 1804. These works may be considered as the starting-point for the researches of Cauchy, Jacobi, and Weierstrass." in the context of "W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (1912)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: Wikiquote: "Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi" (Quotes about Jacobi) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

About Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (/dʒəˈkoʊbi/; German: jaˈkoːbi; 10 December 1804 – 18 February 1851) was a German mathematician who made fundamental contributions to elliptic functions, dynamics, differential equations, determinants, and number theory.