How do calculators and computers do integral and differential calculus?

Question

Digital arithmetic seems straightforward, but how do calculators do calculus? How do calculators find the area between two curves, or calculate the instantaneous rate of change of a function?

Thanks for responding

In: Technology

Answer 1

I’m a hardware engineer, and don’t recall much of the software algorithms I worked with to do these calculations, but i have implemented many complex math operations in hardware using newtons method. The idea is we can make a guess using linear mathematics and then use newtons method in iterations using an FSM to get a more accurate result.

For something like a simple derivative or integral, we can trivially solve im hardware or software using iterations.