The History of the Calculus Essay

The History of the Calculus

The Calculus, being a difficult subject requires much more than the intuition and genius of one man. It took the work and ideas of many great men to establish the advanced concepts now known as calculus.

The history of the Calculus can be traced back to c. 1820 BC to the Egyptian Moscow papyrus, in which an Egyptian successfully calculated the volume of a pyramidal frustum.
[1][2] Calculating volumes and areas, the basic function of integral calculus, can be traced back from the school of Greek mathematics, Eudoxus (c. 408−355 BC) used the method of exhaustion, which prefigures the concept of the limit, to calculate areas and volumes while Archimedes (c. 287−212 BC) developed this idea further, inventing heuristics which resemble integral calculus.[3] The method of exhaustion was later used in China by Liu Hui in the 3rd century AD in order to find the area of a circle. In the 5th century AD, Zu Chongzhi used what would later be called Cavalieri's principle to find the volume of a sphere.[2]
Around AD 1000, the Islamic mathematician, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen), was the first to derive the formula for the sum of the fourth powers of an arithmetic progression, using a method that is readily generalizable to finding the formula for the sum of any higher integral powers, which he used to perform an integration.[4] In the 11th century, the Chinese polymath Shen Kuo developed 'packing' equations that dealt with integration. In the 12th century, the Indian mathematician, Bhāskara II, developed an early derivative representing infinitesimal change, and he described an early form of "Rolle's theorem".[5] Also in the 12th century, the Persian mathematician Sharaf al-Dīn al-Tūsī discovered the derivative of cubic polynomials, an important result in differential calculus.[6] In the 14th century, Madhava of Sangamagrama, along with other mathematician-astronomers of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics, described special cases of Taylor series,[7] which are treated in the text Yuktibhasa.[8][9][10]
In the modern period, independent discoveries relating to calculus were being made in early 17th century Japan, by mathematicians such as Seki Kowa, who expanded upon the method of exhaustion.
In Europe, the foundational work was a treatise due to Bonaventura Cavalieri, who argued that volumes and areas should be computed as the sums of the volumes and areas of infinitesimal thin cross-sections. The ideas were similar to Archimedes' in The Method, but this treatise was lost until the early part of the twentieth century.
The formal study of calculus combined Cavalieri's infinitesimals with the calculus of finite differences developed in Europe at around the same time. The combination was achieved by John Wallis, Isaac Barrow, and James Gregory, the latter two proving the second fundamental theorem of calculus around 1675.
The product rule and chain rule, the notion of higher derivatives, Taylor series, and analytical functions were introduced by Isaac Newton in an idiosyncratic notation which he used to solve problems of mathematical physics. He used the methods of calculus to solve the problem of planetary motion, the shape of the surface of a rotating fluid, the oblateness of the earth, the motion of a weight sliding on a cycloid, and many other problems discussed in his Principia Mathematica. In other work, he developed series expansions for functions, including fractional and irrational powers, and it was clear that he understood the principles of the Taylor series. He did not publish all these discoveries, and at this time infinitesimal methods were still considered disreputable.
These ideas were systematized into a true calculus of infinitesimals by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was originally accused of plagiarism by Newton. He is now regarded as an independent inventor of and contributor to calculus. His contribution was to provide a clear set of rules for manipulating

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