Talk:Calculus

No integral calculus page?
There is a nice article for differential calculus, which describes it as a branch of calculus and gives some history, but there is no corresponding page for integral calculus. There is only a redirect to integral. Why then is differential calculus not a redirect to derivative? 121.216.128.241 (talk) 10:59, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi. Your best bet at finding editors who are interested and know enough about this subject is at WikiProject Mathematics. Perhaps bring this up at their talk page (Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics). Bennv3771 (talk) 11:57, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * "Integral calculus" is much less used than "differential calculus". This is probably the reason for not having . Also, having a separate article needs to have content that is not covered by the target of the redirect. It seems that this is not the case here. D.Lazard (talk) 12:39, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I have started a discussion relating to this comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics. --Trovatore (talk) 19:11, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

"More citation needed" rationale
User:XOR'easter, I disagree with your revert. If the content is "general expositions of standard material that's in a zillion books", why don't we cite the material from the book itself? That's far better than no citations. I do agree though that me drive-by tagging isn't gonna help the article that much, so I'm gonna dig up math textbooks and cite the article with them. Hopefully that would make the article much better in quality. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 02:50, 26 July 2022 (UTC)


 * I simply don't think that slapping a banner on top of a page that reads basically fine for the first several sections is helpful guidance. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 02:52, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I've gone through and added several footnotes. A little more could be done in that vein, perhaps, though at the moment I'm wondering if portions of the as-yet-unfootnoted text are actually too detailed for this article and should be cut instead. I expect that bits and pieces were added along the way by people who wanted to say everything they knew about integrals, without stopping to think if those remarks belonged in an overview like this article. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 03:32, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Agreed, we should cut down on irrelevant details. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 03:33, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

General notes for possible improvements
I've been aiming for at least one citation per paragraph; even though this is all standard material and the guideline for routine calculations probably applies to some of it, it can't hurt to have pointers to good books. The last paragraph of the introduction doesn't really follow the Manual of Style, since it talks about things that the rest of the article doesn't go into more depth about. The "Applications" section is still not great; some of it, like the planimeter business, looks like random trivia that got shoved in without regard for whether or not it's significant enough to belong in a survey article like this one. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 21:42, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Reduce size of history section
I'm updating History of calculus from the history section of this article and hope to eventually remove most of the history from this article. Parts of the history will have to remain of course but they should point to relevant other articles for more details. The parts on foundations and Significance have a place as well but should be more directed towards the modern day and they can be copied to the history article where they can dwell more on the past.

I hope this will leave the article freer to include more about modern day developments and uses. NadVolum (talk) 21:57, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Odd image for the calculus page
The "image" or "logo" for this page seems to imply that the function (1) evaluates to zero at zero, and (2) is differentiable, neither of which are the case for a general function. Why not write the fundamental theorem of calculus, which is that the derivative of an integral is the integrand? Here we have that the integral of the derivative of a function is the function itself, but then we have to think about bounds of integration and differentiability, rather than just integrability. This is just a small suggestion, because I found it odd. 137.53.245.136 (talk) 21:39, 8 June 2023 (UTC)


 * This is exactly what brought me to this page. I think one should not have an at the very least questionable logo in such a prominent spot. 134.2.173.10 (talk) 10:47, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Are calculus and calculas two different things
Im a little confused? They very simlair but Calculus seems an improper spelling and defintion because of similarities. 209.171.85.100 (talk) 19:40, 13 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Please do not edit Wikipedia while on drugs. Dhrm77 (talk) 19:52, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

Expand Origins of Calculus
Why do we not include the Maya mathematicians? They developed calculus over 1500 years ago. Why are they left out of this discussion? 2601:184:0:4820:DF5:D1A4:6E29:76BD (talk) 12:43, 5 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Do you have a reliable source for this? D.Lazard (talk) 18:30, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 7 December 2023
The 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350. The discovery is currently - and wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries. That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself. But other names from the Kerala School, notably Madhava and Nilakantha, should stand shoulder. 14.102.51.22 (talk) 06:39, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Cannolis (talk) 06:45, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Rearranging sections - practical to history
Hello, I am thinking about rearranging the sections of this article to be more practical. The etymology and history sections should be after the Principles and applications sections like other science and mathematics articles. There is a main history of calculus page and in looking at the calculus article, it looks quite a bit like the history article in structure.

Most readers want to know about what calculus is in this article, not the history of it. Rearrange the sections or shorten the history of calculus section? Any opinions? &#32;Ramos1990 (talk) 05:30, 2 April 2024 (UTC)


 * About etymology: IMO, section is totally inadequate for a mathematical article; the true mathematical etymology is the following is the following. "Calculus" is a Latin word that means "computation", and, at the time of Newton, Leibniz and (later) Euler most mathematics were written in Latin. Indeed, two of Euler's book are entitled Institutiones calculi differentialis (Foundations of computation with differentials) and Institutiones calculi integralis (Foundations of computation with integrals). So, the English word "calculus" is simply an abbreviation of these two titles. In my youth, the French equivalent of "calculus" was "calcul différentiel et intégral". So, a single sentence in the lead is sufficient for the etymology: "Calculus" is the abbreviation of the Latin phrase meaning "differential and integral computation".
 * About the history: There is a clear WP:REDUNDANTFORK between section and History of calculus. So  must dramatically be reduced to the description of the revolution of mathematics that consisted of the introduction of real functions, differentiable calculus and integral calculus (from Newton and Leibniz to Euler). This is fundamental to well understand calculus. IMO, such a short history should play the role of the sections "Motivation" of many mathematical articles. IMO, the place of such a section cannot be decided before having a draft. D.Lazard (talk) 10:05, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I concur that the history section is too long to come that early in the article, and it either needs to be shortened or rearranged. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 12:29, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 6 May 2024
The following sentence in the applications section should use "its" in place of "it's" as the word is functioning as a possessive, not a contraction of "it is."

"Alternatively, Newton's second law can be expressed by saying that the net force equals the object's mass times it's acceleration, which is the time derivative of velocity and thus the second time derivative of spatial position." Harrison Clark (talk) 01:57, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * ✅ Bestagon ⬡ 02:33, 6 May 2024 (UTC)