Was it that Newton and Leibniz didn’t really know what they were doing? I presume that they had to create proofs for how their integrals and derivatives worked.
Were their calculations incorrect because they weren’t rigorous?
In: 3
In short, Newton and Leibniz invented calculus for real numbers, but they didn’t have an actual definition of what a real number is. Unlike whole numbers and fractions, defining real numbers is tricky, and it took until the 20th century to get it right. Another thing is that Newton and Leibniz used something ill-defined that they called “infinitely small” numbers, which don’t actually exist on the standard real number set. Those were replaced with the theory of limits in the 19th century.
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