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

Having looked at the various developments of the method of exhaustion as produced by the ancient Greeks and independently by the ancient Chinese, which can seriously be considered as a sort of proto-integral calculus, we then turned briefly to look at the extraordinary developments of the Kerala School of astronomy and mathematics in the late medieval period, which however did not appear to have any know influence outside of Kerala. If we turn back to the developments in Europe following what might be considered as the golden age of ancient Greek mathematics which extended from the fourth to the down to the second century BCE and featured such figures as Eudoxus (c. 390–c. 340 BCE), Euclid (fl. 300 BCE), Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), and Apollonius (c. 240–c.190 BCE), as well as a host of other minor characters, the development of high level mathematics goes into a gradual but continuous decline until its revival by the Islamic mathematicians in the medieval period. One small ray of…