Calculus Essays -- Mathematics History

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...