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Calculus

The document discusses the history and development of calculus. It originated from concepts in ancient Egypt and Greece and was later independently developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Calculus has two main branches - differential calculus concerning rates of change, and integral calculus concerning accumulation. It has widespread uses in science, engineering, and other fields.

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13 views5 pages

Calculus

The document discusses the history and development of calculus. It originated from concepts in ancient Egypt and Greece and was later independently developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Calculus has two main branches - differential calculus concerning rates of change, and integral calculus concerning accumulation. It has widespread uses in science, engineering, and other fields.

Uploaded by

vijay kumar honnali
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We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Calculus

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


This article is about the branch of mathematics. For other uses, see Calculus
(disambiguation).

Part of a series of articles about

Calculus

 Fundamental theorem
 Limits
 Continuity
 Rolle's theorem
 Mean value theorem
 Inverse function theorem

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Integral
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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. The former concerns
instantaneous rates of change, and the slopes of curves, while the latter concerns
accumulation of quantities, and areas under or between curves. These two branches
are related to each other by the fundamental theorem of calculus, and they make use of
the fundamental notions of convergence of infinite sequences and infinite series to a
well-defined limit.[1]

Infinitesimal calculus was developed independently in the late 17th century by Isaac
Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.[2][3] Later work, including codifying the idea of
limits, put these developments on a more solid conceptual footing. Today, calculus has
widespread uses in science, engineering, and social science.[4]

Etymology

Look up calculus in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

In mathematics education, calculus denotes courses of elementary mathematical


analysis, which are mainly devoted to the study of functions and limits. The
word calculus is Latin for "small pebble" (the diminutive of calx, meaning "stone"), a
meaning which still persists in medicine. Because such pebbles were used for counting
out distances,[5] tallying votes, and doing abacus arithmetic, the word came to mean a
method of computation. In this sense, it was used in English at least as early as 1672,
several years before the publications of Leibniz and Newton.[6]
In addition to differential calculus and integral calculus, the term is also used for naming
specific methods of calculation and related theories that seek to model a particular
concept in terms of mathematics. Examples of this convention include propositional
calculus, Ricci calculus, calculus of variations, lambda calculus, and process calculus.
Furthermore, the term "calculus" has variously been applied in ethics and philosophy,
for such systems as Bentham's felicific calculus, and the ethical calculus.

History
Main article: History of calculus
Modern calculus was developed in 17th-century Europe by Isaac Newton and Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (independently of each other, first publishing around the same time) but
elements of it first appeared in ancient Egypt and later Greece, then in China and the
Middle East, and still later again in medieval Europe and India.

Ancient precursors
Egypt
Calculations of volume and area, one goal of integral calculus, can be found in
the Egyptian Moscow papyrus (c. 1820 BC), but the formulae are simple instructions,
with no indication as to how they were obtained.[7][8]

Greece
See also: Greek mathematics

Archimedes used the method of exhaustion to calculate the


area under a parabola in his work Quadrature of the Parabola.
Laying the foundations for integral calculus and foreshadowing the concept of the limit,
ancient Greek mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390 – 337 BC) developed
the method of exhaustion to prove the formulas for cone and pyramid volumes.

During the Hellenistic period, this method was further developed by Archimedes (c.
287 – c. 212 BC), who combined it with a concept of the indivisibles—a precursor
to infinitesimals—allowing him to solve several problems now treated by integral
calculus. In The Method of Mechanical Theorems he describes, for example, calculating
the center of gravity of a solid hemisphere, the center of gravity of a frustum of a
circular paraboloid, and the area of a region bounded by a parabola and one of
its secant lines.[9]

China
The method of exhaustion was later discovered independently in China by Liu Hui in the
3rd century AD to find the area of a circle.[10][11] In the 5th century AD, Zu Gengzhi, son
of Zu Chongzhi, established a method[12][13] that would later be called Cavalieri's
principle to find the volume of a sphere.

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