eli5: What do people mean when they say “Newton invented calculus”?

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I can’t seem to wrap my head around the fact that math is invented? Maybe he came up with the symbols of integration and derivation, but these are phenomena, no? We’re just representing it in a “language” that makes sense. I’ve also heard people say that we may need “new math” to discover/explain new phenomena. What does that mean?

Edit: Thank you for all the responses. Making so much more sense now!

In: Mathematics

43 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Rather than invented think of it more like a discovery. Newton was the first one to discover the mathematical relationships that can be described by the formulas and terms used in Calculus. Before Newton had thought about this nobody knew the things he discovered or the formulas he created. But the universe still existed and numbers fundamentally still worked the same way before he was around he was just the first to work this out.

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