History of Integration

Time period Person/method/purpose

Ancient Egyptian Moscow papyrus (c. 1820 BC)
- Calculations of volumes and areas

Sulba Sutras treatise (c. 8 BC)

- Indian mathematicians rules of the chord,
where the sine, cosine, and tangent were
conceived.

Babylonians - trapezoidal rule

Eudoxus (c. 408−355 BC)

- method of exhaustion
the concept of the limit, to calculate areas
and volumes

Archimedes (c. 287−212 BC)

- developed method of exhaustion further,
inventing heuristics which resemble the
methods of integral calculus

Liu Hui ( 4th century AD)

- reinvented the idea of method of
exhaustion in order to find the area of a
circle.

Zu Chongzhi ( 5th century AD)

- established a method that would later be
called Cavalieri's principle to find the
volume of a sphere

Democritus(Greek mathematician)
- use of infinitesimals
- the division of objects into an infinite
number of cross-sections

Archimedes
- develop the idea of infinitesimals
- inventing heuristic methods which
resemble modern day concepts
Medievel Alhazen (middle east)
- derived a formula for the sum of fourth
powers
- He used the results to carry out what
would now be called an integration, where
the formulas for the sums of integral
squares and fourth powers allowed him to
calculate the volume of a paraboloid.

Madhava of Sangamagrama and the Kerala school

of astronomy and mathematics
- stated components of calculus such as the
Taylor series and infinite series
approximations.
- However, they were not able to combine
many differing ideas under the two
unifying themes of the derivative and the
integral.
-

Modern times

Newton and Leibniz are two great figures who are credited with the creation of calculus independently.
Both Newton and Leibniz are given credit for independently developing the basics of calculus. It is
Leibniz, however, who is credited with giving the new discipline the name it is known by today:
"calculus". Newton's name for it was "the science of fluents and fluxions".

The work of both Newton and Leibniz is reflected in the notation used today. Newton introduced the
notation f for the derivative of a function f. Leibniz introduced the symbol ∫ for the integral and wrote
the derivative of a function y of the variable x as dy/dx both of which are still in use.

Before newton and Leibniz independently came up the The fundamental theorem of calculus there were
many mathematician that came before them that paved the way for both newton and Leibniz work.

The foundations for the discovery of the integral were first laid by Cavalieri, an Italian Mathematician, in
around 1635. Cavalieri’s work centered around the observation that a curve can be considered to be
sketched by a moving point and an area to be sketched by a moving line.

John Wallis’ contribution to the integral calculus was to derive an algebraic law for integration that
alleviated the necessity of going through such analysis for each curve. Through examining the
relationship between a function and the function that describes its area (henceforth referred to as the
area-function), he was able to derive an algebraic law for determining area-functions.
One of the first major uses of infinite series in the development of calculus came from Pierre De
Fermat’s method of integration. Though previous methods of integration had used the notion of infinite
lines describing an area, Fermat was the first to use infinite series in his methodology.

Wallis and Fermat's work had laid the groundwork for the modern concept of the integral. However,
what Fermat and Wallis had failed to recognize was the relationship between the differential and the
integral. That idea would be developed simultaneously by two men: Newton and Leibniz. This would
later be known as the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.