Take it to the limit one more time – a history of calculus IV

Take it to the limit one more time – a history of calculus IV Today, I’m going to deviate slightly from course and talk about something that didn’t actually play a role in the development of calculus. There is a tendency to talk about single people discovering things and things being discovered once. However, there are famous examples of things in the history of mathematics and science where two or even more people discovered the same thing independently of each other, for example Darwin and Wallace and the theory of evolution through natural selection. There was a time when such parallel discoveries were considered rare, however as the history of science has progressed it has become clear that such events are actually fairly common. I have in previous posts been looking at the method of exhaustion and tracing its use and development in Greek geometry from Antiphon, though Bryson of Heraclea, Eudoxus and Archimedes. This mathematical method was also developed totally independently in…