Common boundary The definition of a continuous quantity THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS is the rate of change of functions

of continuous quantities. To understand what that means, we must distinguish what is continuous from what is discrete. A natural number is a collection of indivisible and separate units.

The people in the room, the electrons in an atom, the names of numbers. They are discrete units. You cannot take half of any one. If you do, it will not be that unit -- it will not have that same name -- any more. Half a person is not also a person. We count things that are discrete: One person, two, three, four, and so on. But consider the distance between A and B. That distance is not

composed of discrete units. There is nothing to count -- it is not a number of anything. We say, instead, that it is a continuous whole. That means that as we go from A to B, the line "continues" without a break. Now, a collection of discrete units will have only certain parts. Of 10 people, we can take only half, a fifth, or a tenth. When we divide a discrete collection, we will eventually come to an indivisible one; in this case, one person. But since the length AB is continuous, we could divide it into any number of parts. Not only could we take half of it, we could take any part we please -- a tenth, a hundredth, or a billionth -because AB is not composed of indivisible units. And most important, any part of AB, however small, will still be a length. The idea of a continuum, or a continuous quantity, then, is that there is no limit to the smallness of the parts into which it could be divided. We imagine a continuum to be "infinitely divisible," which is a brief way of saying that no matter into how many parts it has been divided, it could be divided still further. And each part will itself be infinitely divisible