The Strength Of Nonstandard Analysis

This book reflects the progress made in the forty years since the appearance of Abraham Robinson’s revolutionary book Nonstandard Analysis in the foundations of mathematics and logic, number theory, statistics and probability, in ordinary, partial and stochastic differential equations and in education. The contributions are clear and essentially self-contained.

1 More than thirty years after its discovery by Abraham Robinson , the ideas and techniques of Nonstandard Analysis (NSA) are being applied across the whole mathematical spectrum,as well as constituting an im portant field of research in their own right. The current methods of NSA now greatly extend Robinson's original work with infinitesimals. However, while the range of applications is broad, certain fundamental themes re cur. The nonstandard framework allows many informal ideas (that could loosely be described as idealisation) to be made precise and tractable. For example, the real line can (in this framework) be treated simultaneously as both a continuum and a discrete set of points; and a similar dual ap proach can be used to link the notions infinite and finite, rough and smooth. This has provided some powerful tools for the research mathematician - for example Loeb measure spaces in stochastic analysis and its applications, and nonstandard hulls in Banach spaces. The achievements of NSA can be summarised under the headings (i) explanation - giving fresh insight or new approaches to established theories; (ii) discovery - leading to new results in many fields; (iii) invention - providing new, rich structures that are useful in modelling and representation, as well as being of interest in their own right. The aim of the present volume is to make the power and range of appli cability of NSA more widely known and available to research mathemati cians.

Starting with a simple formulation accessible to all mathematicians, this second edition is designed to provide a thorough introduction to nonstandard analysis. Nonstandard analysis is now a well-developed, powerful instrument for solving open problems in almost all disciplines of mathematics; it is often used as a ‘secret weapon’ by those who know the technique. This book illuminates the subject with some of the most striking applications in analysis, topology, functional analysis, probability and stochastic analysis, as well as applications in economics and combinatorial number theory. The first chapter is designed to facilitate the beginner in learning this technique by starting with calculus and basic real analysis. The second chapter provides the reader with the most important tools of nonstandard analysis: the transfer principle, Keisler’s internal definition principle, the spill-over principle, and saturation. The remaining chapters of the book study different fields for applications; each begins with a gentle introduction before then exploring solutions to open problems. All chapters within this second edition have been reworked and updated, with several completely new chapters on compactifications and number theory. Nonstandard Analysis for the Working Mathematician will be accessible to both experts and non-experts, and will ultimately provide many new and helpful insights into the enterprise of mathematics.

Two-part treatment begins with a self-contained introduction to the subject, followed by applications to stochastic analysis and mathematical physics. "A welcome addition." — Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 1986 edition.

This book introduces Robinson's nonstandard analysis, an application of model theory in analysis. Unlike some texts, it does not attempt to teach elementary calculus on the basis of nonstandard analysis, but points to some applications in more advanced analysis. The contents proceed from a discussion of the preliminaries to Nonstandard Models; Nonstandard Real Analysis; Enlargements and Saturated Models; Functionals, Generalized Limits, and Additive Measures; and finally Nonstandard Topology and Functional Analysis. No background in model theory is required, although some familiarity with analysis, topology, or functional analysis is useful. This self-contained book can be understood after a basic calculus course.

Nonstandard Methods of Analysis is concerned with the main trends in this field; infinitesimal analysis and Boolean-valued analysis. The methods that have been developed in the last twenty-five years are explained in detail, and are collected in book form for the first time. Special attention is paid to general principles and fundamentals of formalisms for infinitesimals as well as to the technique of descents and ascents in a Boolean-valued universe. The book also includes various novel applications of nonstandard methods to ordered algebraic systems, vector lattices, subdifferentials, convex programming etc. that have been developed in recent years. For graduate students, postgraduates and all researchers interested in applying nonstandard methods in their work.

This textbook is an introduction to non-standard analysis and to its many applications. Non standard analysis (NSA) is a subject of great research interest both in its own right and as a tool for answering questions in subjects such as functional analysis, probability, mathematical physics and topology. The book arises from a conference held in July 1986 at the University of Hull which was designed to provide both an introduction to the subject through introductory lectures, and surveys of the state of research. The first part of the book is devoted to the introductory lectures and the second part consists of presentations of applications of NSA to dynamical systems, topology, automata and orderings on words, the non- linear Boltzmann equation and integration on non-standard hulls of vector lattices. One of the book's attractions is that a standard notation is used throughout so the underlying theory is easily applied in a number of different settings. Consequently this book will be ideal for graduate students and research mathematicians coming to the subject for the first time and it will provide an attractive and stimulating account of the subject.

In the aftermath of the discoveries in foundations of mathematiC's there was surprisingly little effect on mathematics as a whole. If one looks at stan dard textbooks in different mathematical disciplines, especially those closer to what is referred to as applied mathematics, there is little trace of those developments outside of mathematical logic and model theory. But it seems fair to say that there is a widespread conviction that the principles embodied in the Zermelo - Fraenkel theory with Choice (ZFC) are a correct description of the set theoretic underpinnings of mathematics. In most textbooks of the kind referred to above, there is, of course, no discussion of these matters, and set theory is assumed informally, although more advanced principles like Choice or sometimes Replacement are often mentioned explicitly. This implicitly fixes a point of view of the mathemat ical universe which is at odds with the results in foundations. For example most mathematicians still take it for granted that the real number system is uniquely determined up to isomorphism, which is a correct point of view as long as one does not accept to look at "unnatural" interpretations of the membership relation.