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
It means he literally invented it.
He invented the mathematical processes for working with derivatives, limits, infinite series, integrals, and other things that define what calculus is. He exploited existing mathematics to formalize a new way of using mathematics. Geometry is not very good at working with the infinitely small, but it is arbitrarily easy for calculus and this allows you to do all sorts of cool things. Newton invented that.
Newton actually did not invent the notation. We use (at least largely) the notation preferred by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who is credited with inventing calculus independently of Newton at about the same time.
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