Revolution of Calculus

Sir Isaac Newton (a British Scientist) was the first person to fully develop calculus which caused a revolution of mathematics. Modern physics and physical chemistry would be impossible without it. Other academic disciplines such as biology and economics also rely heavily on calculus for analysis.

His theory of calculus built on earlier work by his fellow Englishmen John Wallis and Isaac barrow, as well as on work of such continental mathematicians as Rene Descartes, Pierre de Fermat, Bonaventura Cavalieri, Johann van Waveren Hudde and Gillies Personne de Robserval. Unlike the static geometry of the Greeks, calculus allowed mathematicians and engineers to make sense of the motion and dynamic change in the changing world around us, for example the orbits of the planets and the motion of fluids.

The initial problem Newton was confronting was that, although it was easy enough to represent and calculate the average slope of a curve because the slope of a curve was constantly varying, and there was no method to give the exact slope at any one individual point on the curve i.e. effectively the slope of a tangent line to the curve at that point.

Newton had a huge impact on society. His studies in mathematics led to the formation of modern calculus. Through his formulas, ways were found to solve areas space occupied by anything placed along a curved surface. That was by far his greatest accomplish in the field of maths. In the modern day Isaac’s ideas are now called differential calculus, integral calculus and differential equation.

Newton choose not to publish his revolutionary mathematics straight away, worried about being ridiculed for his unconventional ideas, and contented himself with circulating his thoughts among his friends. leibniz published in 1684, newton published in 1693. Today, people give equal credit to Newton and Leibniz for calculus’s discovery.