Guagua National Colleges

Guagua Pampanga
G.N.C Montessori

Basic Calculus

History of Basic Calculus

Submitted To: Andrea Kim De Mesa

Submitted By: Justin Gabriel T. Miranda

History of Calculus

Calculus, known in its early history as infinitesimal calculus, is a mathematical discipline

focused on limits, continuity, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. Isaac Newton and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently developed the theory of indefinitesimal calculus in the
later 17th century. By the end of the 17th century, each scholar claimed that the other had stolen
his work, and the Leibniz-Newton calculus controversy continued until the death of Leibniz in
1716.

The development of Calculus can roughly be described along a timeline which goes through
three periods: Anticipation, Development, and Rigorization. In the Anticipation stage techniques
were being used by mathematicians that involved infinite processes to find areas under curves or
maximaize certain quantities. In the Development stage Newton and Leibniz created the
foundations of Calculus and brought all of these techniques together under the umbrella of the
derivative and integral. However, their methods were not always logically sound, and it took
mathematicians a long time during the Rigorization stage to justify them and put Calculus on a
sound mathematical foundation.

In their development of the calculus both Newton and Leibniz used "infinitesimals", quantities
that are infinitely small and yet nonzero. Of course, such infinitesimals do not really exist, but
Newton and Leibniz found it convenient to use these quantities in their computations and their
derivations of results. Although one could not argue with the success of calculus, this concept of
infinitesimals bothered mathematicians. Lord Bishop Berkeley made serious criticisms of the
calculus referring to infinitesimals as "the ghosts of departed quantities"

It is interesting to note that Leibniz was very conscious of the importance of good notation and
put a lot of thought into the symbols he used. Newton, on the other hand, wrote more for himself
than anyone else. Consequently, he tended to use whatever notation he thought of on that day.
This turned out to be important in later developments. Leibniz's notation was better suited to
generalizing calculus to multiple variables and in addition it highlighted the operator aspect of
the derivative and integral. As a result, much of the notation that is used in Calculus today is due
to Leibniz.

Berkeley's criticisms were well founded and important in that they focused the attention of
mathematicians on a logical clarification of the calculus. It was to be over 100 years, however,
before Calculus was to be made rigorous. Ultimately, Cauchy, Weierstrass, and Riemann
reformulated Calculus in terms of limits rather than infinitesimals. Thus the need for these
infinitely small (and nonexistent) quantities was removed, and replaced by a notion of quantities
being "close" to others. The derivative and the integral were both reformulated in terms of limits.
While it may seem like a lot of work to create rigorous justifications of computations that
seemed to work fine in the first place, this is an important development. By putting Calculus on a
logical footing, mathematicians were better able to understand and extend its results, as well as
to come to terms with some of the more subtle aspects of the theory.

Pioneers of calculus

Archimedes used the method of exhaustion to compute the area inside a circle.

The ancient period introduced some of the ideas that led to integral calculus, but does not seem
to have developed these ideas in a rigorous and systematic way. Calculations of volumes and
areas, one goal of integral calculus, can be found in the Egyptian Moscow papyrus (c. 1820 BC),
but the formulas are only given for concrete numbers, some are only approximately true, and
they are not derived by deductive reasoning. Babylonians may have discovered the trapezoidal
rule while doing astronomical observations of Jupiter.

From the age of Greek mathematics, Eudoxus (c. 408−355 BC) used the method of exhaustion,
which foreshadows the concept of the limit, to calculate areas and volumes, while Archimedes
(c. 287−212 BC) developed this idea further, inventing heuristics which resemble the methods of
integral calculus. Greek mathematicians are also credited with a significant use of infinitesimals.
Democritus is the first person recorded to consider seriously the division of objects into an
infinite number of cross-sections, but his inability to rationalize discrete cross-sections with a
cone's smooth slope prevented him from accepting the idea. At approximately the same time,
Zeno of Elea discredited infinitesimals further by his articulation of the paradoxes which they
create.

Archimedes developed this method further, while also inventing heuristic methods which
resemble modern day concepts somewhat in his The Quadrature of the Parabola, The Method,
and On the Sphere and Cylinder. It should not be thought that infinitesimals were put on a
rigorous footing during this time, however. Only when it was supplemented by a proper
geometric proof would Greek mathematicians accept a proposition as true. It was not until the
17th century that the method was formalized by Cavalieri as the method of Indivisibles and
eventually incorporated by Newton into a general framework of integral calculus. Archimedes
was the first to find the tangent to a curve other than a circle, in a method akin to differential
calculus. While studying the spiral, he separated a point's motion into two components, one
radial motion component and one circular motion component, and then continued to add the two
component motions together, thereby finding the tangent to the curve. The pioneers of the
calculus such as Isaac Barrow and Johann Bernoulli were diligent students of Archimedes; see
for instance C. S. Roero (1983).

The method of exhaustion was reinvented in China by Liu Hui in the 4th century AD in order to
find the area of a circle. In the 5th century, Zu Chongzhi established a method that would later be
called Cavalieri's principle to find the volume of a sphere.

Integrals

Niels Henrik Abel seems to have been the first to consider in a general way the question as to
what differential equations can be integrated in a finite form by the aid of ordinary functions, an
investigation extended by Liouville. Cauchy early undertook the general theory of determining
definite integrals, and the subject has been prominent during the 19th century. Frullani integral,
David Bierens de Haan's work on the theory and his elaborate tables, Lejeune Dirichlet's lectures
embodied in Meyer's treatise, and numerous memoirs of Legendre, Poisson, Plana, Raabe,
Sohncke, Schlömilch, Elliott, Leudesdorf and Kronecker are among the noteworthy
contributions.

Applications

The application of the infinitesimal calculus to problems in physics and astronomy was
contemporary with the origin of the science. All through the 18th century these applications were
multiplied, until at its close Laplace and Lagrange had brought the whole range of the study of
forces into the realm of analysis. To Lagrange (1773) we owe the introduction of the theory of
the potential into dynamics, although the name "potential function" and the fundamental memoir
of the subject are due to Green (1827, printed in 1828). The name "potential" is due to Gauss
(1840), and the distinction between potential and potential function to Clausius. With its
development are connected the names of Lejeune Dirichlet, Riemann, von Neumann, Heine,
Kronecker, Lipschitz, Christoffel, Kirchhoff, Beltrami, and many of the leading physicists of the
century.

It is impossible in this place to enter into the great variety of other applications of analysis to
physical problems. Among them are the investigations of Euler on vibrating chords; Sophie
Germain on elastic membranes; Poisson, Lamé, Saint-Venant, and Clebsch on the elasticity of
three-dimensional bodies; Fourier on heat diffusion; Fresnel on light; Maxwell, Helmholtz, and
Hertz on electricity; Hansen, Hill, and Gyldén on astronomy; Maxwell on spherical harmonics;
Lord Rayleigh on acoustics; and the contributions of Lejeune Dirichlet, Weber, Kirchhoff, F.
Neumann, Lord Kelvin, Clausius, Bjerknes, MacCullagh, and Fuhrmann to physics in general.
The labors of Helmholtz should be especially mentioned, since he contributed to the theories of
dynamics, electricity, etc., and brought his great analytical powers to bear on the fundamental
axioms of mechanics as well as on those of pure mathematics.
Furthermore, infinitesimal calculus was introduced into the social sciences, starting with
Neoclassical economics. Today, it is a valuable tool in mainstream economics.

Calculating Curves and Areas Under Curves

The roots of calculus lie in some of the oldest geometry problems on record. The Egyptian Rhind
papyrus (c. 1650 BCE) gives rules for finding the area of a circle and the volume of a truncated
pyramid. Ancient Greek geometers investigated finding tangents to curves, the centre of gravity
of plane and solid figures, and the volumes of objects formed by revolving various curves about
a fixed axis.
By 1635 the Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri had supplemented the rigorous tools of
Greek geometry with heuristic methods that used the idea of infinitely small segments of lines,
areas, and volumes. In 1637 the French mathematician-philosopher René Descartes published his
invention of analytic geometry for giving algebraic descriptions of geometric figures. Descartes’s
method, in combination with an ancient idea of curves being generated by a moving point,
allowed mathematicians such as Newton to describe motion algebraically. Suddenly geometers
could go beyond the single cases and ad hoc methods of previous times. They could see patterns
of results, and so conjecture new results, that the older geometric language had obscured.

For example, the Greek geometer Archimedes (287–212/211 BCE) discovered as an isolated
result that the area of a segment of a parabola is equal to a certain triangle. But with algebraic
notation, in which a parabola is written as y = x2, Cavalieri and other geometers soon noted that
the area between this curve and the x-axis from 0 to a is a3/3 and that a similar rule holds for the
curve y = x3—namely, that the corresponding area is a4/4. From here it was not difficult for
them to guess that the general formula for the area under a curve y = xn is an + 1/(n + 1).

Calculating Velocities and Slopes

The problem of finding tangents to curves was closely related to an important problem that arose
from the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s investigations of motion, that of finding the velocity at
any instant of a particle moving according to some law. Galileo established that in t seconds a
freely falling body falls a distance gt2/2, where g is a constant (later interpreted by Newton as the
gravitational constant). With the definition of average velocity as the distance per time, the
body’s average velocity over an interval from t to t + h is given by the expression [g(t + h)2/2 −
gt2/2/h. This simplifies to gt + gh/2 and is called the difference quotient of the function gt2/2. As
h approaches 0, this formula approaches gt, which is interpreted as the instantaneous velocity of
a falling body at time t.

This expression for motion is identical to that obtained for the slope of the tangent to the
parabola f(t) = y = gt2/2 at the point t. In this geometric context, the expression gt + gh/2 (or its
equivalent f(t + h) − f(t)/h) denotes the slope of a secant line connecting the point (t, f(t)) to the
nearby point (t + h, f(t + h)) (see figure). In the limit, with smaller and smaller intervals h, the
secant line approaches the tangent line and its slope at the point t.
An illustration of the difference between average and instantaneous rates of changeThe graph of
f(t) shows the secant between (t, f(t)) and (t + h, f(t + h)) and the tangent to f(t) at t. As the time
interval h approaches zero, the secant (average speed) approaches the tangent (actual, or
instantaneous, speed) at (t, f(t)).

References
https://www.britannica.com/science/calculus-mathematics
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus