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
calculus. People say that calculus is just the revision or expansion of old or basic equations and I
believe that also.
In economics and business there are some uses for calculus. One important application of
integral calculus in business is the evaluation of the area under a function. This can be used
in a probability model. Probability is another uses in integral calculus for business because you
could find...
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