Symbolic Methods
Symbolic methods may be traced back to Taylor, and the much debated analogy between successive differentiation and ordinary exponentials had been observed by numerous writers before the nineteenth century. Arbogast (1800) was the first, however, to separate the symbol of operation from that of quantity in a differential equation. François (1812) and Servois (1814) seem to have been the first to give correct rules on the subject. Hargreave (1848) applied these methods in his memoir on differential equations, and Boole freely employed them. Grassmann and Hermann Hankel made great use of the theory, the former in studying equations, the latter in his theory of complex numbers.
Read more about this topic: History Of Calculus
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