Cosmos and bad story of science

Originally posted by adam warlock

Who else besides Leb and Newt had any notion of calculus

Since you use the word "any" before Calculus here's a highly incomplete list:
Alhazen
Madhava
Parameshvara
Neelakanta Somayaji
Jyeshtadeva
Achyuta Pisharati
Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri
Achyuta Panikkar
Isaac Barrow
Descartes
Fermat
Pascal
John Wallis
Cavalieri
Kep ...[text shortened]... pe then they aren't the same thing. Newton certainly didn't think that they were the same thing.

Infinitesimals and fluxions, in my opinion, are at best nonrigorous accounting devices that helped Newtown & Co. "feel their way around" to certain sublime truths. Really it was Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Karl Weierstrass, I think, who invented what may properly be called "calculus" in the modern sense: a rigorous, purely algebraic calculus that does not depend on geometric intuition. Of course this could be debated, because it's history, and history is never objective.