As the Ballad of Gresham College later described it:įrom its beginning, Gresham College encouraged the practical sciences, rather than the Aristotelian studies still pursued at the ancient universities: The Gresham professorships arose from the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, which provided for £50 per year for each of seven professors to read lectures in Divinity, Astronomy, Music, Geometry, Law, Physic and Rhetoric. So first, let’s make an excursion to Gresham College. Thirdly, we visit France and the gradual movement from geometry to algebra (with a brief excursion into some new approaches to pi) – and finally, the development of the calculus. Next, we’ll gravitate towards astronomy, from Copernicus to Newton. I’ve divided my talk into four parts – first, the movement towards the practical sciences, as exemplified by the founding of Gresham College and the Royal Society. Math students of the present day should not fear, calculus is not just for the elite, not just for the genius, but for anyone who has the time and discipline to learn it.We’ve now covered two-thirds of our journey ‘From Caliphs to Cambridge’, and in this lecture I want to try to survey the mathematical achievements of the seventeenth century – a monumental task. I want to make a point that, a student who has a concept of algebra already knows more than Newton did when he invented calculus, and in fact, calculus was born out of what we know as geometry and algebra. Nobody would claim that Newton wasn’t a brilliant man, but calculus has been refined for over 300 years with many features added (like limits, which make everything easier), meaning that no longer does one have to be a genius to understand it. More simply, Newton already knew the concepts of calculus because he was describing gravity and planets it was a matter of writing it down and showing proof that it works. Through trial and error (and quite a bit of ingenuity), Newton saw the need for a whole new math, and this came from his conceptual understanding of physics. One may ask “how does one invent a new form of mathematics” this answer is quite simple Isaac Newton forced relationships between physical phenomena and the mathematics of the day. These were the types of questions (in conjunction with the fact that Cambridge University -where Newton studied – was closed due to numerous outbreaks of the plague) that drove Newton to expand on mathematics and develop the concepts of differential and integral calculus. When trying to describe how an object falls, Newton found that the speed of the object increases every split second and that no mathematics currently used could describe the object at any moment in time.Īnother tale of Newton’s reasoning is that a colleague of his asked “Why are the orbits of the planets in an ellipse?”, to which, Newton took some time to ponder, and came back with the fact that the ellipses are, in fact, sections of cones, and armed with calculus, he could describe exactly how these sections behaved. Newton is known for developing the laws of motion and gravitation, which undoubtedly led to his work in calculus. So why was this new and complicated form of mathematics invented? And how does one manage to come up with such an abstract idea? Newton was foremost a physicist, and in his day, he tackled many difficult issues in physics, probably the most famous of these issues is gravity. It is worth noting, however, that Newton developed calculus 8 years before Gottfried, but Gottfried is known for developing modern European mathematics by introducing carefully drawn symbols and rules (many people say the equals sign ‘=’ was the work of Gottfried) – Both men will claim that the other plagiarized them for the rest of their lives, a conflict known as the “great sulk”. Sir Isaac Newton of England, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz of Germany, both did quite a lot of work forming a language of numbers that could accurately describe nature.
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