What is the analogy of sum that you’re thinking about? Ignoring how the little pieces are defined, what would be a cool way to combine them? For example, you can take the product of a series of numbers to get any number, that’s pretty cool. And then you can convert a series to a continuous function by taking a limit, just like an integral, except rather than the limit going to really small pieces, the limit goes to pieces really close to 1.
You could also raise a base to a series of powers to get any number, then take that to a continuous limit to get an integral-analogue. Or do other operations in series, but I can’t think of any really motivating ones right now.
Can you invert these to get derivative-analogues (wiki page)? For the product integral, the value of the corresponding derivative turns out to be the limit of more and more extreme inverse roots, as you bring the ratio of two points close to 1.
Are there any other interesting derivative-analogues? What if you took the inverse of the difference between points, but then took a larger and larger root? Hmm… You’d get something that was 1 almost everywhere for nice functions, except where the function’s slope got super-polynomially flat or super-polynomially steep.
Someone has probably thought of this already, but if we defined an integration analogue where larger and larger logarithmic sums cause their exponentiated, etc. value to approach 1 rather than infinity, then we could use it to define a really cool account of logical metaphysics: Each possible state of affairs has an infinitesimal probability, there are infinitely many of them, and their probabilities sum to 1. This probably won’t be exhaustive in some absolute sense, since no formal system is both consistent and complete, but if we define states of affairs as formulas in some consistent language, then why not? We can then assign various differential formulas to different classes of states of affairs.
(That is the context in which this came up. The specific situation is more technically convoluted.)
What is the analogy of sum that you’re thinking about? Ignoring how the little pieces are defined, what would be a cool way to combine them? For example, you can take the product of a series of numbers to get any number, that’s pretty cool. And then you can convert a series to a continuous function by taking a limit, just like an integral, except rather than the limit going to really small pieces, the limit goes to pieces really close to 1.
You could also raise a base to a series of powers to get any number, then take that to a continuous limit to get an integral-analogue. Or do other operations in series, but I can’t think of any really motivating ones right now.
Can you invert these to get derivative-analogues (wiki page)? For the product integral, the value of the corresponding derivative turns out to be the limit of more and more extreme inverse roots, as you bring the ratio of two points close to 1.
Are there any other interesting derivative-analogues? What if you took the inverse of the difference between points, but then took a larger and larger root? Hmm… You’d get something that was 1 almost everywhere for nice functions, except where the function’s slope got super-polynomially flat or super-polynomially steep.
Someone has probably thought of this already, but if we defined an integration analogue where larger and larger logarithmic sums cause their exponentiated, etc. value to approach 1 rather than infinity, then we could use it to define a really cool account of logical metaphysics: Each possible state of affairs has an infinitesimal probability, there are infinitely many of them, and their probabilities sum to 1. This probably won’t be exhaustive in some absolute sense, since no formal system is both consistent and complete, but if we define states of affairs as formulas in some consistent language, then why not? We can then assign various differential formulas to different classes of states of affairs.
(That is the context in which this came up. The specific situation is more technically convoluted.)