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

Math and physics didn’t exist and don’t exist. We watched how everything behaves and then came up with a language to describe it and predict it. That’s why we change/expand our math, our observations of the world around us don’t match what this language says. So we alter equations until they predict accurately again. IMO, we are inventing it, it doesn’t exist, the universe doesn’t care what our math says. Our math is just a different representation of what already is.

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