40 Quotes About Calculus

Voltaire called the calculus "the Art of numbering and measuring exactly a Thing whose Existence cannot be conceived."See Letters Concerning the English Nation p. 152

In making the basis of the calculus more rigorously formal, Weierstrass also attacked the appeal to intuition of continuous motion which is implied in Cauchy's expression -- that a variable approaches a limit.

Thus the required rigor was found in the application of the concept of number, made formal by divorcing it from the idea of geometrical quantity

Yet in another way, calculus is fundamentally naive, almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future -- or better yet, reconstruct the past. I wish I could do that now.

Leadership calculus: always choose to rise over run.

As its campfires glow against the dark, every culture tells stories to itself about how the gods lit up the morning sky and set the wheel of being into motion. The great scientific culture of the West--our culture--is no exception. The calculus is the story this world first told itself as it became the modern world.

Most of his predecessors had considered the differential calculus as bound up with geometry, but Euler made the subject a formal theory of functions which had no need to revert to diagrams or geometrical conceptions.

Carnot, one of a school of mathematicians who emphasized the relationship of mathematics to scientific practice, appears, in spite of the title of his work, to have been more concerned about the facility of application of the rules of procedure than about the logical reasoning involved.

He sits there and absorbs everything and does better than us on calculus tests.