|
Main article: History of calculus Modern calculus was developed in 17th century Europe by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but elements of it have appeared in ancient Greece, China, medieval Europe, India, and the Middle East. Ancient 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 volume and area, one goal of integral calculus, can be found in the Egyptian Moscow papyrus (c. 1820 BC), but the formulas are simple instructions, with no indication as to method, and some of them lack major components.[2] 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.[3] The method of exhaustion was later reinvented in China by Liu Hui in the 3rd century AD in order to find the area of a circle.[4] In the 5th century AD, Zu Chongzhi established a method that would later be called Cavalieri's principle to find the volume of a sphere.[5] Medieval Alexander the Great's invasion of northern India brought Greek trigonometry, using the chord, to India where the sine, cosine, and tangent were conceived. Indian mathematicians gave a semi-rigorous method of differentiation of some trigonometric functions. In the Middle East, Alhazen derived a formula for the sum of fourth powers. He used the results to carry out what would now be called an integration, where the formulas for the sums of integral squares and fourth powers allowed him to calculate the volume of a paraboloid.[6] In the 14th century, Indian mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama and the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics stated components of calculus such as the Taylor series and infinite series approximations.[7] However, they were not able to "combine many differing ideas under the two unifying themes of the derivative and the integral, show the connection between the two, and turn calculus into the great problem-solving tool we have today".[6] Modern "The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics, and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking." —John von Neumann[8] In Europe, the foundational work was a treatise due to Bonaventura Cavalieri, who argued that volumes and areas should be computed as the sums of the volumes and areas of infinitesimally thin cross-sections. The ideas were similar to Archimedes' in The Method, but this treatise was lost until the early part of the twentieth century. Cavalieri's work was not well respected since his methods could lead to erroneous results, and the infinitesimal quantities he introduced were disreputable at first. The formal study of calculus brought together Cavalieri's infinitesimals with the calculus of finite differences developed in Europe at around the same time. Pierre de Fermat, claiming that he borrowed from Diophantus, introduced the concept of adequality, which represented equality up to an infinitesimal error term.[9] The combination was achieved by John Wallis, Isaac Barrow, and James Gregory, the latter two proving the second fundamental theorem of calculus around 1670. Isaac Newton developed the use of calculus in his laws of motion and gravitation. The product rule and chain rule, the notion of higher derivatives, Taylor series, and analytical functions were introduced by Isaac Newton in an idiosyncratic notation which he used to solve problems of mathematical physics.[10] In his works, Newton rephrased his ideas to suit the mathematical idiom of the time, replacing calculations with infinitesimals by equivalent geometrical arguments which were considered beyond reproach. He used the methods of calculus to solve the problem of planetary motion, the shape of the surface of a rotating fluid, the oblateness of the earth, the motion of a weight sliding on a cycloid, and many other problems discussed in his Principia Mathematica (1687). In other work, he developed series expansions for functions, including fractional and irrational powers, and it was clear that he understood the principles of the Taylor series. He did not publish all these discoveries, and at this time infinitesimal methods were still considered disreputable. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the first to publish his results on the development of calculus. These ideas were arranged into a true calculus of infinitesimals by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was originally accused of plagiarism by Newton.[11] He is now regarded as an independent inventor of and contributor to calculus. His contribution was to provide a clear set of rules for working with infinitesimal quantities, allowing the computation of second and higher derivatives, and providing the product rule and chain rule, in their differential and integral forms. Unlike Newton, Leibniz paid a lot of attention to the formalism, often spending days determining appropriate symbols for concepts. Leibniz and Newton are usually both credited with the invention of calculus. Newton was the first to apply calculus to general physics and Leibniz developed much of the notation used in calculus today. The basic insights that both Newton and Leibniz provided were the laws of differentiation and integration, second and higher derivatives, and the notion of an approximating polynomial series. By Newton's time, the fundamental theorem of calculus was known. When Newton and Leibniz first published their results, there was great controversy over which mathematician (and therefore which country) deserved credit. Newton derived his results first (later to be published in his Method of Fluxions), but Leibniz published his Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis first. Newton claimed Leibniz stole ideas from his unpublished notes, which Newton had shared with a few members of the Royal Society. This controversy divided English-speaking mathematicians from continental mathematicians for many years, to the detriment of English mathematics. A careful examination of the papers of Leibniz and Newton shows that they arrived at their results independently, with Leibniz starting first with integration and Newton with differentiation. Today, both Newton and Leibniz are given credit for developing calculus independently. It is Leibniz, however, who gave the new discipline its name. Newton called his calculus "the science of fluxions". Since the time of Leibniz and Newton, many mathematicians have contributed to the continuing development of calculus. One of the first and most complete works on finite and infinitesimal analysis was written in 1748 by Maria Gaetana Agnesi.[12] Maria Gaetana Agnesi Foundations In calculus, foundations refers to the rigorous development of a subject from precise axioms and definitions. In early calculus the use of infinitesimal quantities was thought unrigorous, and was fiercely criticized by a number of authors, most notably Michel Rolle and Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley famously described infinitesimals as the ghosts of departed quantities in his book The Analyst in 1734. A recent study argues that Leibnizian calculus was more solidly grounded than Berkeley's empiricist critique thereof.[13] Working out a rigorous foundation for calculus occupied mathematicians for much of the century following Newton and Leibniz, and is still to some extent an active area of research today. Several mathematicians, including Maclaurin, tried to prove the soundness of using infinitesimals, but it would not be until 150 years later when, due to the work of Cauchy and Weierstrass, a way was finally found to avoid mere "notions" of infinitely small quantities.[14] The foundations of differential and integral calculus had been laid. In Cauchy's writing (see Cours d'Analyse), we find a broad range of foundational approaches, including a definition of continuity in terms of infinitesimals, and a (somewhat imprecise) prototype of an (ε, δ)-definition of limit in the definition of differentiation. In his work Weierstrass formalized the concept of limit and eliminated infinitesimals. Following the work of Weierstrass, it eventually became common to base calculus on limits instead of infinitesimal quantities. Bernhard Riemann used these ideas to give a precise definition of the integral. It was also during this period that the ideas of calculus were generalized to Euclidean space and the complex plane. In modern mathematics, the foundations of calculus are included in the field of real analysis, which contains full definitions and proofs of the theorems of calculus. The reach of calculus has also been greatly extended. Henri Lebesgue invented measure theory and used it to define integrals of all but the most pathological functions. Laurent Schwartz introduced distributions, which can be used to take the derivative of any function whatsoever. Limits are not the only rigorous approach to the foundation of calculus. Another way is to use Abraham Robinson's non-standard analysis. Robinson's approach, developed in the 1960s, uses technical machinery from mathematical logic to augment the real number system with infinitesimal and infinite numbers, as in the original Newton-Leibniz conception. The resulting numbers are called hyperreal numbers, and they can be used to give a Leibniz-like development of the usual rules of calculus. Significance While many of the ideas of calculus had been developed earlier in Egypt, Greece, China, India, Iraq, Persia, and Japan, the use of calculus began in Europe, during the 17th century, when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz built on the work of earlier mathematicians to introduce its basic principles. The development of calculus was built on earlier concepts of instantaneous motion and area underneath curves. Applications of differential calculus include computations involving velocity and acceleration, the slope of a curve, and optimization. Applications of integral calculus include computations involving area, volume, arc length, center of mass, work, and pressure. More advanced applications include power series and Fourier series. Calculus is also used to gain a more precise understanding of the nature of space, time, and motion. For centuries, mathematicians and philosophers wrestled with paradoxes involving division by zero or sums of infinitely many numbers. These questions arise in the study of motion and area. The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea gave several famous examples of such paradoxes. Calculus provides tools, especially the limit and the infinite series, which resolve the paradoxes. |
About us|Jobs|Help|Disclaimer|Advertising services|Contact us|Sign in|Website map|Search|
GMT+8, 2015-9-11 21:59 , Processed in 0.152854 second(s), 16 queries .
