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Title is a bit misleading, what they were doing was a lot closer to a precursor to calculus.
by gene-h 11y ago
Title is a bit misleading, what they were doing was a lot closer to a precursor to calculus.
- rubidium 11y agoReminds me a bit of a guy my physics teacher met in the oil fields of alaska. The guy, who had never finished high school (and much less seen Calculus), had figured out a way to calculate the volume of a large, tapering tank using his own shorthand. He had the concept of limits and was essentially doing calculus.
- sdenton4 11y agoAs my math phd adviser once told me, 'Those who do not understand homology are doomed to reinvent it.'
- WalterBright 11y agoMy economics textbook in college was written for students who did not know calculus. I was a bit puzzled by two pages of fairly dense math in it. Examining it more closely, they essentially reinvented calculus using their own weird notation so they could calculate marginal returns, i.e. derivatives. But hey, the textbook didn't require any scary prerequisites like calculus :-)