In Reply to: Book Error posted by Evan on February 18, 2003 at 14:52:34:
>I found a grammatical error in the textbook. On page 109, he refers to "L'Hospital's rule", it should be L'Hopital's, with a circonflex over the o.
Actually, both spellings are correct. In the time of
Guillaume Francois Antoine Marquis de L'Hospital (1661-1704),
old French was still in use, and his title was indeed
le Marquis de L'Hospital. However in modern French, the spelling
of this word changed to L'Hopital (with the circumflex on the o),
and this is the accepted spelling today. (Indeed, later members of
the L'Hospital family officially changed the name to L'Ho^pital).
Interestingly, it is claimed that L'Hopital's rule was in fact
not invented by the Marquis de L'Hopital, but instead by his
teacher, Johann Bernoulli (a much more famous mathematician,
incidentally). The claim goes that the much wealthier Marquis essentially paid Bernoulli for the result, which then went into the Marquis's textbook under his own name. The rest is history...
Terry