Franco 1
Tina Franco
Prof. Brewer
MAT210
November 29, 2017
Honors Topic
The Two Founders of Calculus: Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz
The purpose of this paper is to examine Newton and Leibniz’s investigations into the developing field of infinitesimal calculus.
Before the time of when Newton and Leibniz had discovered calculus, the word itself could refer to any shape or form of math, but shortly after they had discovered the way, “calculus: was a popular term for a type of math that was based upon their findings and theories. By the median of the 17th century, the Europeans had changed their primary foundation of knowledge. Compared to the previous century, one in which had sustained its Hellenistic approach to mathematics for the beginning of research, Leibniz, Newton, and their colleagues started to look towards more of the work of modern thinkers.
Newton had actually made the discovery of calculus between the years of 1665 – 1667 after the university that he had attended was now closed due to a contaminant of the Plague, which had eventually caused an outbreak. Newton was relatively young at the time, 22, and had a preference to not publish his work. At about roughly this same time, Leibniz was in Germany and he had discovered his own findings about calculus by himself. While Newton preferred to not publish his findings, Leibniz was eager to share what he had discovered himself. Because of this fact, the two, Newton and Leibniz, were very cross and bitter with the other. This situation would eventualy be later known as, “the Great Sulk”. (Brief History of Calculus) While it was not known back then who had actually discovered calculus first , it is known in the present that Newton and Leibniz had both discovered calculus self-suffieciently, without any interference of the other. However, Leibniz did discover it about 8 years later than Newton, and while this fact is true, he is credited with being the founder of modern European mathematics. Leibniz is best known for creating notations that are currently being used in Calculus classes today, including the ‘dy/dx’ and the symbols for integrals. Newton is known mostly for his contributions to physics and his 3 laws of motion.
Newton had first started to get the conclusion of calculus because of his involvement in inquiries of physics and geometry. He had a view of calculus as, “the scientific description of the generation of motion and magnitudes.”(History of Calculus)However, Leibniz had been focused mainly on a tangent problem and was eventually led to believe that calculus was an explanation of change in a metaphysical way.
An important part of their insight was how they formulated the properties inversely between integrals and differentials of functions. This type of work had been predicted by their forerunners, but Newton and Leibniz had been the first to see calculus as a structure that had created new descriptive terms. These discoveries we not only preserved in their imagination, but also in their own ability to understand and comprehend the insights that were surrounding them and to transform these insights into a universal process that eventually led to them creating a whole new math system.
Works Cited
“A Brief History of Calculus: From Early to Modern Times.” History of Calculus,
“History of Calculus.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Nov. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus.