Calculus

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Calculus

"One of the greatest contributions to modern mathematics, science, and

engineering was the invention of calculus near the end of the 17th century,"

says The New Book of Popular Science. Without the invention of calculus, many

technological accomplishments, such as the landing on the moon, would have been

difficult.

The word "calculus" originated from the Latin word meaning pebble. This is

probably because people many years ago used pebbles to count and do arithmetic

problems.

The two people with an enormous contribution to the discovery of the

theorems of calculus were Sir Isaac Newton of England and Baron Gottfried

Wilhelm of Germany. They discovered these theorems during the 17th century

within a few years of each other.

Isaac Newton was considered one of the great physicists all time. He

applied calculus to his theories of motion and gravitational pull. He was able

to discover a function and describe mathematically the motion of all objects in

the universe.

Calculus was invented to help solve problems dealing with "changing or

varying" quantities. Calculus is considered "mathematics of change." There are

some basic or general parts of calculus. Some of these are functions,

derivative, antiderivatives, sequences, integral functions, and multivariate

calculus.

Some believe that calculus is too hard or impossible to learn without much

memorization but if you think that calculus is all memorizing then you will not

get the object of learning...

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