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Essay on History of Calculus
The historian Carl Boyer has correctly called calculus ‘the most effective instrument for scientific investigation that mathematics has ever produced’. Calculus is the access to nearly all fields of higher mathematics and is also applied to solve problems in biology, medicine, economics, business and many other areas. Modern science and engineering use calculus to express physical laws in precise mathematical terms and to study the consequences of such laws. Calculus is also used to calculate the orbits of the earth satellites, to design inertial navigation systems, cyclotrons and radar system, to explore problems of space travel, to test theories on the dynamics of the atmosphere and many more.
Calculus is the mathematics of motion and change. This was true in the evolutionary stages of the subject as it is true at present. Calculus has two branches: differential and integral calculus. Differential calculus deals with the problem of calculating rates of change while integral calculus deals with the problem of determining a function from information about the rate of change. For instance, differential calculus helps to calculate the velocity and acceleration of a moving body at any instant, while integral calculus can be used to produce a formula that tells how far the body has traveled from its starting point at any instant.
Like every tale, the story of calculus also has a passage from darkness into light. The preparation to the invention of calculus stretches from the ancient world to the 17th century — mostly the work of astronomers, mathematicians and physicists. Nevertheless, it took Sir Isaac Newton (in 1665-66) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in 1673-76) to put the all the ideas together. Around the same time, though independently of each other, these two great mathematicians invented the fundamental theorem of calculus.The Calculus" is an expression people use to denote that branch of mathematics...........
