History of Calculus - Ancient Greek Precursors of The Calculus

Ancient Greek Precursors of The Calculus

Greek mathematicians are credited with a significant use of infinitesimals. Democritus is the first person recorded to consider seriously the division of objects into an infinite number of cross-sections, but his inability to rationalize discrete cross-sections with a cone's smooth slope prevented him from accepting the idea. At approximately the same time, Zeno of Elea discredited infinitesimals further by his articulation of the paradoxes which they create.

Antiphon and later Eudoxus are generally credited with implementing the method of exhaustion, which made it possible to compute the area and volume of regions and solids by breaking them up into an infinite number of recognizable shapes.

Archimedes of Syracuse developed this method further, while also inventing heuristic methods which resemble modern day concepts somewhat. (See Archimedes' Quadrature of the Parabola, The Method, Archimedes on Spheres & Cylinders.) It should not be thought that infinitesimals were put on a rigorous footing during this time, however. Only when it was supplemented by a proper geometric proof would Greek mathematicians accept a proposition as true. It was not until the time of Newton that these methods were incorporated into a general framework of integral calculus.

Archimedes was the first to find the tangent to a curve, other than a circle, in a method akin to differential calculus. While studying the spiral, he separated a point's motion into two components, one radial motion component and one circular motion component, and then continued to add the two component motions together, thereby finding the tangent to the curve. The pioneers of the calculus such as Isaac Barrow and Johann Bernoulli were diligent students of Archimedes; see for instance C. S. Roero (1983).