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The Creation Of Calculus, Gottfried Leibniz And Isaac Newton

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Today, Calculus is one of the most important branches of mathematics with applications in science, engineering and economics. But who invented this wonderful tool? As with many questions of invention, the answer is a little complicated. Most mathematicians will tell you that two men deserve the credit for the development of modern calculus, Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Of course, Newton and Leibniz were merely the next links in a long chain of discoveries that led to the creation of modern calculus. The ancient Greeks had first dipped their feet into the field with the famous mathematician Archimedes being the first to find the tangent to a curve and Antiphon of Athens developing the method of exhaustion, an early technique to compute the area of a region.
Then the Indians added their own discoveries with the astronomer Aryabhata expressing an astronomical problem in the form of a differential equation and Parameshvara of Kerala developing an early version of the mean value theorem in the fifteen hundreds.
Finally, during the European enlightenment, men like Fermat, Pascal, and Isaac Barrow further pursued the emerging new field developing the concept of the derivative. Barrow even offered the first proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus linking the concepts of differentiation and integration; however, it was one of Barrow’s young students, Isaac Newton who would make the next big splash in the creation of the art of calculus. In Isaac’s eighty-four years, he

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