don’t tell me; half-cocked jack brought it back from hindoostan.
Signed:
Albert Gore
The infinite series goes way way back to Achilles and his turtle.
Newton invented calculus during a two year trip home from the university (during an outbreak of plague) and he never trumpeted his discovery or made much of it at all, except as a tool that he used to develop his physics.
If he really did get a big boost from ideas from India that would explain both the incredible speed with which he accomplished his feat and his great humility on this subject.
As he said himself, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Maybe, in keeping with the particular Political Correctness of his age, he didn’t feel up to the task of giving credit to brown-skinned, non-Christian giants.
and this trivia will help me pick up chicks?
The problem with this, is that infinite series were in rudiment already known by Archimedes (his method of exhaustion), and that neither Newton nor Leibniz relied on limiting arguments in the development of calculus. Calculus was developed on the basis of infinitesimals or fluxions, which (with all the properties needed) are incompatible with classical logic (cf. a tract by Bp. Berekely (C of E) attacking Edmund Halley).
Limiting arguments, which tie the infinitesimal calculus to infinite series were developed about 150 years later by Cauchy.
Find any use of inifinitesimals before Newton and Leibniz and you have a case.
The nearest thing one has (but only seen through the lens of Descarte’s coordinate geometry) is the assertion of the sophist Heraclites, in contradiction of one of Euclid’s postulates, that the intersection between a circle and a tangent line is larger than a point. (From the point of view of infinitesimal calculus, while it contains only one point, it also contains all (first order) infinitesimal deformations of the point in the tangent direction.)
(My doctoral dissertation had to do with models in the context of intuitionistic logic of the sort of infinitesimals Newton and Leibniz actually used. When I teach calculus, I tell the students they have a choice; they can learn limits or substitute a graduate course in mathematical logic, thereby putting the original way of doing calculus on a sound footing.)
ping
Everyone knows Calculus was invented in Zimbabwe.
In a more series vein, show us the original works. Otherwise, it can be little more than hearsay.
