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

Imagine a chessboard. No one invents a piece or how a piece can move. You can’t invent a rook, it just is a rook and it moves how it moves. But you can invent a sequence of things to get a result you want, like the scholars mate. The person who figured out how to do a scholars mate invented it, even though the pieces could have moved like that at any time.

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