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The Calculus Diaries Chapter 2 Summary

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In chapter one of the The Calculus Diaries, ‘To Infinity and Beyond’, a handful of great minds’ lives are discussed. Every life story had one thing in common: Calculus. Attempts at understanding this concept came short of spectacular for many of these people. Each one of them had used prior knowledge to create their own understanding of infinitesimal differences. Euclid used his knowledge in geometry to assist him, Eudoxus used approximation to get as close as he could to decipher precise calculations, and crazily enough, Isaac Newton used a casual apple experience. Their findings began to stack upon each other, and Newton had been lucky enough to be born into the time period after all their previous failures to receive a basis of understanding …show more content…

Other scientists still did not like how there was the missing piece of true understanding about infinitesimal differences. Infinity was still yet to be fully comprehended. This wasn’t anything new, it had been stumping the greatest mathematical minds for two millennia. A well-known Greek philosopher that lived in the fifth century B.C., who thought a great deal about motion, had a paradox that was never suppose to be taken literally about how halfing a distance between two points over and over would eventually give a number, that was so close to the destination, that it was practically on that point. Consequently, the distance between the two points would be so small, you would have to half the distance an infinite amount of times to actual perceive that point to be exactly on top of the other. With all these problems, a few new members appear into the equation. Aristotle, a greek philosopher as well, categorized infinity into potential infinite and actual infinite. It may have cleared things up just a little, but an eighteenth-century mathematician named Jean le Rond d’Alembert had a way of looking at it not as a continuous travel to infinity, but as an infinite number of travels to a specific destination. This idea probably gave a practical thinker like Newton a migraine headache, but to other critical thinking mathematicians it gave offered new horizons to discover in their own dynamic

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