The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Calculus is a powerful mathematical tool. But for hundreds of years after its invention in the 17th century, it stood on a shaky ...

The Calculus is made up of a few basic principles that anyone can understand. If looked at in the right way, it’s easy to apply these principles to the world around you and to see how the real world ...

School’s in session. Let’s talk about math. Go back to your calculus class senior year in high school. You take the derivative of y with respect to x. You are finding the sensitivity to the change in ...