Greek mathematicians are also credited with a significant use of infinitesimals. 287–212 BC) developed this idea further, inventing heuristics which resemble the methods of integral calculus. 408–355 BC) used the method of exhaustion, which foreshadows the concept of the limit, to calculate areas and volumes, while Archimedes (c. Examples of this include propositional calculus in logic, the calculus of variations in mathematics, process calculus in computing, and the felicific calculus in philosophy.Īrchimedes used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under a parabola in his work Quadrature of the Parabola.įrom the age of Greek mathematics, Eudoxus (c. In addition to the differential calculus and integral calculus, the term is also used widely for naming specific methods of calculation. In this sense, it was used in English at least as early as 1672, several years prior to the publications of Leibniz and Newton. Because such pebbles were used for counting out distances, tallying votes, and doing abacus arithmetic, the word came to mean a method of computation.
The word calculus is Latin for "small pebble" (the diminutive of calx, meaning "stone"), a meaning which still persists in medicine. In mathematics education, calculus denotes courses of elementary mathematical analysis, which are mainly devoted to the study of functions and limits.
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