I just don’t get it. Are they like discovering the ideas and formulas or what?
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Calculus was “invented” roughly at the same time by two different people, using it for two different purposes.
Isaac Newton used it as a solution to physics problems, and Leibniz (not sure his first name) used it for more pure math problems.
At its heart they were both concerned with being able to calculate the slope of a line at possible point on the line (if you imagine a straight line that’s easy, but a constantly changing wiggly curvy line is hard).
Both people realized that a slope on a line is just rise over run or change in Y divided change in X on a graph. And both people created a math process to make the “change” values infinitely small giving a new equation, this process is called a “transformation” (derivation in this case).
Where they differed is that Newton was more concerned real world physics, he was mostly interested with changes in a system *by time* very specifically where as Leibniz was more pure-math focused and just wanted to discover what are essentially “tangents” (point-slopes) on curves.
From Leibniz we get the dY/dX notations and from Newton we get the y’ and x’ notation which (In my engineering school at least) specifically refers to time-based derivates.
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