



212 BC), who combined it with a concept of the indivisibles-a precursor to infinitesimals-allowing him to solve several problems now treated by integral calculus. 390 – 337 BC) developed the method of exhaustion to prove the formulas for cone and pyramid volumes.ĭuring the Hellenistic period, this method was further developed by Archimedes ( c. Laying the foundations for integral calculus and foreshadowing the concept of the limit, ancient Greek mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus ( c. Furthermore, the term "calculus" has variously been applied in ethics and philosophy, for such systems as Bentham's felicific calculus, and the ethical calculus.Īrchimedes used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under a parabola in his work Quadrature of the Parabola. Examples of this convention include propositional calculus, Ricci calculus, calculus of variations, lambda calculus, and process calculus. In addition to the differential calculus and integral calculus, the term is also used for naming specific methods of calculation and related theories which seek to model a particular concept in terms of mathematics. 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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