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Comment by keanzu | Hacker News Reader

Isaac Newton is considered by some to be the greatest mathematician of all time and is regarded as the "Father of Calculus".

"Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he has done is much the better part." - Gottfried Leibniz

http://www.fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm

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"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage."

"Researchers in England may have finally settled the centuries-old debate over who gets credit for the creation of calculus.

For years, English scientist Isaac Newton and German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz both claimed credit for inventing the mathematical system sometime around the end of the seventeenth century.

Now, a team from the universities of Manchester and Exeter says it knows where the true credit lies — and it's with someone else completely.

The "Kerala school," a little-known group of scholars and mathematicians in fourteenth century India, identified the "infinite series" — one of the basic components of calculus — around 1350."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/calculus-created-in-india...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_School_of_Astronomy_and...

That story's by non-experts and sounds like it's based on a press release. There were basic components of calculus well before that too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus

However, calculus proper (derivatives and integrals of general functions, and the connections between them) did not exist until Newton and Leibniz. Other mathematicians made important steps towards it earlier in the 1600s, and if Newton and Leibniz had not existed, others would have figured it out around the same time.

https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol47_4...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhata

These are interesting articles that seem to agree with what I said. The first one defines calculus in a much more limited way, and refers to some of the earlier basic components I mentioned.

I'm not a historian, but a few months ago I spent some time analysing one of Fibonacci's trigonometric tables (chords, not sine or sine-differences). Aryabhata's sine-differences were much earlier.

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