Calculus is one of the triumphs of the human mind.It emerged from investigations into such basic questions as finding areas, lengths and volumes. In the third century BC, Archimedes determined the area under the arc of a parabola. In the early seventeenth century, Fermat and Descartes studied the problem of finding tangents to curves. But, the subject really came to life in the hands of Newton and Leibniz in the late seventeenth century. In particular, they showed that the geometric problems of finding the areas of planar regions and of finding the tangents to plane curves are intimately related to one another. In subsequent decades, the subject developed further through the work of several mathematicians, most notably, Euler, Cauchy, Riemann and Weierstrass.
Today, calculus occupies a central place in mathematics and is an essential component of undergraduate education. It has an immense number of applications both within and outside mathematics. Judged by the sheer variety of the concepts and results it has generated, calculus can be rightly viewed as a fountainhead of ideas and disciplines in mathematics.
The history of calculus can greatly aid and enrich the understanding of the subject. We encourage you to look at the internet for the same.
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Nalin Pithwa
