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

>How do calculators do calculus?

Different computer programs will “do calculus” in different ways.

**Computer algebra systems** will actually be programmed with algorithms to specifically work out operations like *Int[2x]=x^2* before evaluating *x* over the specified ranges.

**Numerical methods** instead use algorithms that “plug and chug” by chopping up a problem into a bunch of finely-sliced arithmetic-on-datapoints problems to try to get a “close enough” numerical answer to some specific level of numerical precision.