7 Nov
2002
7 Nov
'02
5:16 p.m.
=Daz Turns out Google gives 693 hits for "product integral", and it appears that the concept was first invented by Volterra in 1887.
Cool. There's some interesting papers out there (eg http://www.math.uu.nl/people/gill/Preprints/prod_int_0.pdf ) Browsing them reminds me: I forgot to mention that you can extend prodigals to matrices (with sufficient care--guess you have to use the analog of Lebesgue-Stieltjes integration or something). I wonder if there are continuous versions of Gosper's path-invariant (matrix) (summation) identities? This suggests considering prodigals upon encountering discrete products of almost ANY kind. The lack of accepted terminology and notation for these simple ideas surely limits insight and discourse.