Calculus Timeline |
Person | Date | Mathematical Discovery | Pythagoras | -5** | discovered irrationals like square root of 2 |
Archimedes | -2** | various volumes and surface areas (parabola, cone, sphere)
center of gravity, integration by exhaustion |
Thabit ibn-Qurra | 8** | integral of square root of x |
al-Biruni | 10** | instantaneous velocity and acceleration |
Grégorie de St Vincent | 1620 | limit notion, area of hyperbola |
Cavalieri | 1630 | axioms for area |
Fermat | 1630 | minima & maxima |
Napier, Sarasa | 1610, 1640 | log |
Wallis | 1650 | series |
Pascal | 1650 | integrals of polynomials |
Leibniz & Newton | 1670 | infinitesimal calculus |
Bernoulli | 1680 | differential equations |
L'Hospital | 1690 | L'Hospital's rule for finding limits |
Rolles | 1690 | Mean Value Theorem for derivative |
Taylor | 1710-40 | Taylor series (infinite polynomials) |
Euler | 1750 | curvature of surfaces, many other results |
Lagrange | 1790 | Lagrange method |
Fourier | 1800 | Fourier series (approx by infinite trig series) |
Bolzano | 1810 | formal definition of limits and continuity |
Cauchy | 1820 | formal definition of limits and continuity, residue calculus |
Weierstrass | 1840 | uniform convergence |
Riemann | 1850 | definition of integral, differential geometry |
Cantor | 1870 | sets |
Hermite | 1870 | e is transcendental |
Lindemann | 1880 | pi is transcendental |
Poincaré | 1890 | topology |
Lebesgue | 1900 | Lebesgue integral |
Last update: 2009 January 22