A. H. Lightstone

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A.H. Lightstone at chess

Albert Harold Lightstone (1926–1976)[1] was a Canadian mathematician. He was one of the pioneers of non-standard analysis, a doctoral student of Abraham Robinson, and later a co-author with Robinson of the book Nonarchimedean Fields and Asymptotic Expansions.[2]

Lightstone earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1955, under the supervision of Abraham Robinson; his thesis was entitled Contributions To The Theory Of Quantification.[3] He was a professor of mathematics at Carleton University[4] and Queen's University.[5]

Research

Decimal hyperreals

In his article "Infinitesimals" in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1972,[6] Lightstone described an extended decimal notation for the hyperreals. Here there is a digit at every hypernatural rank rather than merely a digit for every rank given by a natural number. Such a hyperreal decimal is written as

Here the digit appears at rank , which is a typical infinite hypernatural. The semicolon separates the digits at finite ranks from the digits at infinite ranks. Thus, the number 0.000...;...01, with digit "1" at infinite rank H, corresponds to the infinitesimal .

The difference 1 - 0.000...;...01 is 0.999...;...99, with an infinite hypernatural's worth of digits 9. An alternative notation for the latter is

where H is an infinite hypernatural. The extended decimal notation provides a rigorous mathematical implementation of student intuitions of an infinitesimal of the form 0.000...01. Such student intuitions and their usefulness in the learning of infinitesimal calculus were analyzed in a 2010 study by Robert Ely in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education.[7]

Other research

Lightstone's main research contributions were in non-standard analysis. He also wrote papers on angle trisection,[4] matrix inversion,[8] and applications of group theory to formal logic.[9]

Books

Awards and honours

References

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