Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mkl 2409 days ago
That story's by non-experts and sounds like it's based on a press release. There were basic components of calculus well before that too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus

However, calculus proper (derivatives and integrals of general functions, and the connections between them) did not exist until Newton and Leibniz. Other mathematicians made important steps towards it earlier in the 1600s, and if Newton and Leibniz had not existed, others would have figured it out around the same time.

1 comments

These are interesting articles that seem to agree with what I said. The first one defines calculus in a much more limited way, and refers to some of the earlier basic components I mentioned.

I'm not a historian, but a few months ago I spent some time analysing one of Fibonacci's trigonometric tables (chords, not sine or sine-differences). Aryabhata's sine-differences were much earlier.