Differential Calculus Quotes

I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.

History was easy, but I don't know about the Calculus. It seemed like it was making sense, so that probably means I failed.

And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?

Calculus is the outcome of a dramatic intellectual struggle which has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.

If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

Arithmetic starts with the integers and proceeds by successively enlarging the number system by rational and negative numbers, irrational numbers, etc... But the next quite logical step after the reals, namely the introduction of infinitesimals, has simply been omitted. I think, in coming centuries it will be considered a great oddity in the history of mathematics that the first exact theory of infinitesimals was developed 300 years after the invention of the differential calculus.

Every one who understands the subject will agree that even the basis on which the scientific explanation of nature rests is intelligible only to those who have learned at least the elements of the differential and integral calculus, as well as analytical geometry.

I turn aside with a shudder of horror from this lamentable plague of functions which have no derivatives.

Newton, of course, was the inventor of differential calculus so his place in the tale is quite special.

In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.

This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.