Chapter 18
Ten Mathematicians Who Anticipated Calculus before Newton and Leibniz
IN THIS CHAPTER
Greek and Turkish mathematicians grapple with measuring the area under a curve
Chinese mathematicians independently develop similar methods, improving on earlier measurements
In India and the Middle East, mathematicians leverage Hindu-Arabic numbers to anticipate methods of calculus
European mathematicians pick up the gauntlet and calculus is born
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz are widely acclaimed as the 16th-century inventors of a unified theory of calculus. But long before they lived, other mathematicians were making observations about the nature of infinity and employing these insights to perform calculations that anticipated calculus.
We may never know all of their names, but here are ten mathematicians who lived before Newton and Leibniz, yet found surprisingly innovative ways to do calculus before calculus was actually invented.
Zeno of Elea (495–430 BCE)
Zeno of Elea famously proposed several paradoxes showing the difficulty of adding up infinitely many finite values such ...
Get Calculus II Workbook For Dummies now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
