ABSTRACT
The notion of a limit is perhaps the most difficult concept that confronts the beginning student of mathematics. That there are initial difficulties in grasping either the idea or the import of limits is quite comprehensible when seen in a historical context. In the 2000-odd years following the race the limit concept received scant clarification and relatively little mathematical progress was made. Isaac Newton, favored with one of the keenest minds in the history of mankind, was among the first of the great mathematicians to truly grasp the significance of limits, and his contributions to calculus were predicated on this idea. Although the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced an extraordinary number of mathematical geniuses, few were successful in giving mathematical precision to profound ideas with which they were working. Morris Kline has pointed out: Some of the greatest mathematicians of the Eighteenth century, Leonhard Euler and Joseph Louis Lagrange, worked on the problem of clarifying the calculus.
