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
Calculus is a branch of mathematics that deals with how to calculate rates of change at a variety of time frames. Algebra and related mathematics had already been described and thoroughly studied by scholars for centuries before Newton. But Newton realized that these older branches of mathematics were insufficient to describe the phenomena he was studying. So he developed a new way of calculating rates of change at instantaneous intervals thanks to the core concept of calculus: limits. Now, he wasn’t the only scholar doing this. Other scholars, such as Gottfried Leibniz, were also doing similar work. But Newton’s contributions are the most well-known
And that’s what your hypothetical “new math” essentially means: sometimes researchers realize that the existing schools of mathematics are insufficient to mathematically describe what they’re observing, so you need to develop new methods. Entire branches of mathematics come from these practical considerations. Statistics, the branch of math where I personally did most of my studies, originated from insurance companies trying to quantify which clients were of greater or lesser risk of requiring payouts.
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