Who is the true Father of Calculus?

References

Pythagoras

• The Pythagoreans credited all their work to their leader
• Their mottos became "Everything is number"
• Pythagoras came up with the idea of a mathematical proof, as well as the Pythagorean Theorem relating the sides of a right triangle to its hypotenuse.
• The Pythagoreans discovered irrational numbers, which to them was a disaster because the existance of irrational numbers went against their beliefs.

Interesting Fact about the Rise of Calculus

Newton wrote letter to Leibniz

• There were so many different types of problems that couldn’t be answered or addressed using the math that was available before calculus.

• Scholar Alfred Rupert Hall, the priority question has been settled.
• Introduction to his work
• Philosophers at War: The Quarrel Between Newton and Leibniz
• Hall writes: "It was certainly Isaac Newton who first devised a new infinitesimal calculus and elaborated it into a widely extensible algorithm, whose potentialities he fully understood; of equal certainty, the differential and integral calculus, the fount of great developments flowing continuously from 1684 to the present day, was created independently by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz"

Newton's letter to Leibniz

First Step in the rise of Calculus

Newton

• When Archimedes found the area of a parabolic segment

Newton wrote a comment "on the shoulder of gaints"

• Newton discovered calculus between 1665 and 1667 after his university closed due to an outbreak of the Plague.
• Meanwhile, Germany, Leibniz discovered Calculus independently and he was open with his findings.
• Led to a bitter dispute between the two mathematicians later known as the "Great Sulk".
• Today it's well known that both men discovered calculus, Leibniz about 8 years after Newton.
• Newton is best known for his work in physics, and especially his three laws of motion.

• It is import to recognise that whenever we are in the pile of humanity, standing on the shoulder of Descartes or lesser mortals.
• People whom we are leaders.
• There is no greater thrill than seeing them move on to become leaders themselves in different spheres of activity and locations.

Gauss

• At the age of 15 Gauss independantly discovered many mathematical laws and theorems.
• Made contributions to many areas including:
• number theory
• differential equations
• conics
• differential geometry
• Within one year his father, wife and son all passed away
• Gauss is said to have discovered non-Euclidean geometry although he never published anything on the matter because he did not want to ruin his reputation.

Leibniz sent a letter to Newton

• He employed this notation in a 1677 letter to Newton. The differential notation also appeared in Leibniz's memoir of 1684.
• Leibniz invented the calculus independently of Newton rests on the fact that Leibniz
• Published a description of his method some years before Newton printed anything on fluxions
• Always alluded to the discovery as being his own invention.
• Moreover, this statement went unchallenged for some years

Rise of Calculus

Continued

The Letter to Newton

• Fermat found a method of finding maxima and minima which stoday recognized as setting the derivative equal to zero.
• Also invented analytic geometry and modern number theory.

• Rightly enjoyed the strong presumption that he acted in good faith
• Demonstrated in his private papers his development of the ideas of calculus in a manner independent of the path taken by Newton.

• One of the most obscure facts was that there are so many different contributors to calculus, but yet they gave most of all the credit to Newton and Leibniz.

Left: Newton

Right: Lebiniz

What did you learn?

Who is the Father of Calculus?

• One of the most interesting facts that I found after doing all this research was when Ancient civilizations knew that there was a fixed ratio of circumference to diameter that was approximately equal to three.
• The Greeks refined the process and Archimedes is credited with the first theoretical calculation of Pi.

Newton!

Who is the true Father of Calculus?

By: Victoria, Mary, and Elisa