How does one “invent new maths”? Like Isaac Newton inventing Calculus, or John Napier logs. How does one answer a mathematical question that’s never been answered?

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How does one “invent new maths”? Like Isaac Newton inventing Calculus, or John Napier logs. How does one answer a mathematical question that’s never been answered?

In: Mathematics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

To quote Newton “If I saw further than others it was by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” There are only a few fundamental math principles (ex. numbers) that were invented by people seeking to explain their observations of the natural world. Everything else follows from that, but everything else is also still an invention. Newton wasn’t just sitting around someday and thought maybe he should create calculus, the principles of calculus were documented in various eastern mathematically text 1,000’s of years before Newton was even born. Newton and Leibniz just combined all those principles they read into a single consistent notation, they did not event something new.

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