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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:24am on 2013-09-24

"Once one has been initiated into the calculus, it is hard to remember what it was like not to know what a derivative is and how to use it, and to realize that people like Fermat once had to cope with finding maxima and minima without knowing about derivatives at all." -- Judith V. Grabiner, "The Changing Concept of Change: The Derivative from Fermat to Weierstrass", April 1982

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minoanmiss: A detail of the Ladies in Blue fresco (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] minoanmiss at 01:48pm on 2013-09-24
*sighs wistfully*

O Calculus, show me your secrets!
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] acroyear70.livejournal.com at 12:56am on 2013-09-25
I hit a similar revelation when I stopped to think about Kepler and all his little triangles for trying to crack the orbits of planets (or the trapezoids plus that fiddly-bit for his wine-barrel calculations). He was effectively constructing the interval, but lacked the one leap that Liebniz had made to be able to calculate that dx/dy relationship. oh, so close...
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] acroyear70.livejournal.com at 01:10am on 2013-09-25
oh, and it should also be seen as impressive that he came up with all of that without De Cartes's Cartesian coordinate system of modern analytic geometry, either.
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