Math 406 History of Calculus
Time/Location: MWF, 11-12, Altgeld 341
Instructor: Marius Junge, Altgeld
363, Office hour, Thursday 5-6 pm.
Text: Edwards, The Historical Development of the
Calculus, Springer Verlag
Topics
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| 1. |
Ancient Math
(Bablyonia, Egypt and Early Greek Math) |
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| 2. |
Archimedes
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The Dark Age and the Arab contribution
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Tangent Constructions
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Arithemtic of the Infinite
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| 6. |
Newton
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Leibniz
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8.
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This is a math
course!
It might be interesting to understand the development of
calculus from the historical point of view, but we are not
going to do so-in part because of lacking expertise in particular in
greek,... .
Serioulsy, the main goal of this course is to
understand waht kind of reasoning might have lead to one of the
impressive decovers of mankind-formalizing difficult relation between
objects in a mathematical language and developing the
fundamentals of calculus. It is typical that for math that an
elegant nice solution for a problem comes after some agonizing blury
way to talk about the problems. Often the preliminary steps are much
more involved -and seem almost trivial-once you have the correct
solution. We will try to rediscover the diffuculties
and how the have been solved. Our big advtange though is that we will
use the language of nowadays math to talk about the problem.
Grading:
Two Midterms (25% each), 1 Quizz
(5%) or project (5%), Homework
(15%), Final
(30%)
(submission in
pairs-to practice team work-every Monday)
Course hotline
(email to students
and instructor): Share
your questions on homework, course material, homework problems
will only be
discussed after explicit request.
List of
projects
1 Midterm: September 26, 2 Midterm October 24, Quiz
November 22
Hw1
Solution
Hw2
Hw3
Solution
exam1
Hw4
For the history of cubic roots read the following reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_equation
Hw5
Hw6
Cavalieri
A
solution
Pratice
problems
Pratice
problems-solutions