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Calculus, originally called infinitesimal calculus, is a mathematical discipline focused on limits, continuity, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series.Many elements of calculus appeared in ancient Greece, then in China and the Middle East, and still later again in medieval Europe and in India.
Calculus is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithmetic operations. Originally called infinitesimal calculus or "the calculus of infinitesimals", it has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus.
Archimedes also discovers a method which is similar to differential calculus. [1] 3rd century BC - Archimedes develops a concept of the indivisibles—a precursor to infinitesimals—allowing him to solve several problems using methods now termed as integral calculus.
The calculus of variations began with the work of Isaac Newton, such as with Newton's minimal resistance problem, which he formulated and solved in 1685, and published in his Principia in 1687, [2] which was the first problem in the field to be clearly formulated and correctly solved, and was one of the most difficult problems tackled by variational methods prior to the twentieth century.
In the history of calculus, the calculus controversy (German: Prioritätsstreit, lit. 'priority dispute') was an argument between the mathematicians Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over who had first invented calculus .
The fundamental theorem of calculus is a theorem that links the concept of differentiating a function (calculating its slopes, or rate of change at each point in time) with the concept of integrating a function (calculating the area under its graph, or the cumulative effect of small contributions). Roughly speaking, the two operations can be ...
The first documented systematic technique capable of determining integrals is the method of exhaustion of the ancient Greek astronomer Eudoxus and philosopher Democritus (ca. 370 BC), which sought to find areas and volumes by breaking them up into an infinite number of divisions for which the area or volume was known. [1]
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; [a] 1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics.