Posted by erniesparks on March 25, 19100 at 08:30:25:
In Reply to: Newton did or didn't invent calculus? posted by Ryan Kelley on February 21, 19100 at 07:12:29:
The history of calculus goes way back to greeks
in the 5th or 4th century B.C. Archimedes
effectively did special cases of differential and
integral calculus with the method of exhaustion.
What Newton invented was a method of fluents and fluxions. In effect, a fluxion was the derivative of a fluent and a fluent was the
integral of a fluxion, hence Newton's theorem.
There were others working at that time at various
aspects of the subject and Newton may have learned much of his art from his teacher Barrow.
He didn't think the method could bear scrutiny
from others, so he replaced his calculus proofs
for "Principia Mathematica" with geometrical
arguments. Calculus in the familiar form came from L'Hospital's book on the subject.