ORIGINS OF THE INFINITESIMAL CALCULUS

By MORITZ CANTOR, Professor at the University of Heidelberg

The origins of the infinitesimal Calculus!

Listen

carefully to the importance of this subject, on which our Committee has entrusted me to report, so you don't miss anything which I present to you, and then you will no longer remain disappointed. At the risk that I may try your patience and raise the question, why in these circumstances I speak in your assembly, I will acknowledge to you that I am not a philosopher. The question that I presuppose will thus not have been directed by me, but by our Committee. The works which I have drawn my attention to are purely historical, and it is with full knowledge of the facts that I will report, I could say these things unbiased, and I have the right to add: You asked for it, George Dandin. I am a historian, a historian of mathematics, and as such I recount to you, in an

outline as brief as possible, on the manner in which mathematics was used to answer questions defined by the need for the infinitesimal Calculus. Now what are these questions? One must It is a distinguish between two kinds of questions. principle of nature, to change. itself, nothing found on earth is

Nothing comes from destroyed, In seeking to known initial

everything changes and reproduces. can, a)investigate change from a

know the laws according to which change occurs, one position, or b)investigate the state from which a known change always follows. It is the Differential Calculus which nowadays occupies itself with this questions of this first kind, while those questions of the second kind fall under the domain of the Integral Calculus. The Differential Calculus and the Integral Calculus together make up the Infinitesimal Calculus. However, though these questions of the two groups have been presented to thinkers for more than two thousand years, it is curious that nobody devised methods for treating questions of the second order. The Integral Calculus is, at least by the foundation of its principles, after many centuries the older child of two brothers, but the younger, the Differential Calculus, had so fast a growth, that today it seems incapable of growing any heigher, however the older, the Integral Calculus, still has more growth to undergo in order to match the level of phenomena

which depend on it. Allow antiquity. me to cite two examples drawn from A line cutting a curve can have two or Let us take one point of

more points of intersection, therefore one calls it a secant of the curve. intersection as fixed and move along the curve until we arrive to a new point of intersection with the least distance along the curve from the first. One gives to this kind of secant the name tangent, and it tells us the direction in a certain moment of a point following the curve with a continuous motion. envisioned them in a slightly The ancients manner. had the same knowledge of tangents as we do, but different EUCLID for example, in approximately 300 B.C., used tangents to the circumference; only for him it was not a secant cutting two points at a negligible distance from each other, it was a straight line with only one point in common with the circumference, with all its other points separate from the curve. You see clearly that it was an absolutely different way of defining things, for Euclid, from the way we define it. We, thanks to the current definition of the tangent, have Differential Calculus for plane figures that EUCLID did not. I borrow the second example from ARCHIMEDES, who died during the Roman capture of Syracuse in 212 B.C., nearly a century after Euclid. The challenge which he dared to tackle was that of

measuring the volume of an ellipsoid.

His solution

was to declare the interior of the ellipse as no different than a series of cylinders with minimal heights and took their sums, the volume of the ellipsoid being found to lie between the sum of it interior cylinders and its exterior cylinders, which both differed from one another by the least possible amount. What ARCHIMEDES did in this case, is the Integral Calculus, only lacking the notation. EUCLID, as I have just told you, did not conceive of the idea of a line to join two consecutive points on a curve showing us the direction of continuous motion at a point produced by the curve. escaped the ancients. modern phrases. achieved by One however should not believe that the idea of continuity had Going back just a half a century before EUCLID to ARISTOTLE, we confront Infinity, he says, is not a stable condition, but growth itself, and change is the quality consecutive parts which act directly on each other. Would we not be surprised to find this in an introduction to a treatise on the Infinitesimal Calculus? And I could produce many other quotations, if I weren't in a hurry to pass forward to other centuries. We are now in 1300. followers of The scholastics, the later dialectics, and whose ARISTOTLE'S

failures prove the insanity of the doctrine, reigned among the scientists, as well as the mathematicians.

By examining their writings we see discussions on the continuous which prove to us that interest in these thoughts fluere In is had used not to ceased. designate PIERRE how a DE line a DACIE by its compared the continuum to a fluid state. The word

movement produces a surface, the surface of a body. England, BRADWARDINUS wrote treatise exclusively on the continuum. that is to say, the In it he distinguishes space, from the The to

the permanent continuum in which the parts subsist, continuous successive continuum in which parts succeed each other in time to distinguish before from after. permanent dividing time. continuum into is divisible, though one of two not

infinity. One arrives to a point which is indivisible, as time In smaller two intervals types always arrives at an instant, which represents the atom of distinguishing also continuity, kinds of BRADWARDINUS distinguishes

infinity: cathetic infinity and syncathetic infinity. The first, is of unlimited size, the second of a size which permits us to imagine always another larger, this expansion never ending. The syncathetic infinity is the pure and simple infinity of today, whereas the cathetic infinity corresponds rather to what we agree to call today the transfinite, it is the indivisible I mentioned just now. The continuum is not composed of indivisibles, but it is found anywhere. Finally BRADWARDINUS had no shortage of talk about forms,

a very common subject of polemic in the XIIIth and XIVth centuries, which fortunately I did not tempt you with the whole mystery. kind of appreciable I can stick to the remark in which the mind that the form was the intellectual concept of some change participated, so we could get a graphical illustration of their variations using certain latitude lines in order to represent the intensity of a phenomenon at a certain time. You see we are approaching the fundamental idea of Analytic Geometry. It was NICOLE ORESME, Bishop of Lisieux from 1377 until 1382, who first, as far as we know, understood to some extent that it was a problem of geometry. He says in the preface of his treatise that it was inspired by one of the things invented by the ancients, but he claimed at the same time another portion for himself, and since we do not know to which ancients he is referring, as he did not say more than what he owed them, it's him who we must credit until further notice of what is due to its treatment of Latitudes; and the sagacity with which ORESME was able to investigate the other chapters of mathematics attests to his charitable role as an initiator. ORESME, after having drawn a number of latitudes, whose lower ends are based on horizontal lines we can give the name longitudes to, joins the upper ends by a broken line which takes the form of a curve, latitudes where very many follow even closer.

The latitudes are themselves, like the states they represent, sometimes taller, sometimes shorter. ORESEME noted that the rapidity with which the latitudes increase or decrease is minimum at the point of culmination This of the that curve in that I just of described. means this point

culmination the differential quotient taken from the abscissa is zero. It would be going too far, not to credit ORESME with these ideas he had. The theorem in question, he did not prove, nor did he seek to prove, nor did he perceive any computable relationships between corresponding latitudes and longitudes. He probably looked at the figure he indicated, and by an intuition which proves his genius he saw what had escaped a thousand others before him who had looked at the same figure, then he sets forth what he had seen but others misunderstood in a sentence, and then died at birth. the right time. It was only two hundred and fifty years after ORESME that a mathematician returned to the theorem of imperceptable change of ordinates near the culmination point of a curve, perhaps he had the work of ORESME in his hands, whose manuscripts were located in most major libraries in France as well as in Germany, or perhaps he discovered it on his own. He was very capable, the innovator of It is not enough that the thought was emitted, it must be emitted at

analytical astronomy, the discoverer of the laws that govern the movement of planets and are called by his name, immortalized in by the word KEPLER. There, he says, where something changes its place from the lowest to the highest and again back to the lowest, the difference is to some extent imperceptible, and this was one law derived from the circle. I need to explain somewhat the words of the last sentence. EUCLID already spoke about the angle He proved that this contained between the tangent of a circumference and the circumference itself. angle is smaller than any rectilinear angle, but he did not give it any name. PROCLUS, in the middle of the Vth century, spoke of the angle the arc of a circle makes with the tangent by the name , similar
to a horn, or cornicular in the version of Viete. BRADWARDINUS celebrated foresaw we of find the the expression of angle In of who the

contingence, and before him CAMPANUS DE NOVARA, the editor elements EUCLID, by the logical difficulties presented

compound angle. view this that, in

Is it an angle, or not, which is smaller It was under this point of century, said, CARDANO in 1593, and that his the It was on XVIth VIETE

than any rectilinear angle? the that

contemporaries had resurrected the question. occasion

circumference was nothing other than a polygon with an infinite number of infinitely small sides, and that the tangent, coincided with one of these sides, make any angle with the circumference. could not It is more than

probable

that

KEPLER

thought

that

the

angle

of

contingence, had nothing in common with a rectilinear angle, when he cites a law derived from the circle which shows the characteristic minimum of change in height of a curve above its based near its point of culmination.

The remark by KEPLER, that I have just explained, is incidentally introduced in a work of the highest interest for us on our principle subject. Doliometrie of KEPLER, published deals with volumes of bodies of revolution. It is the KEPLER He in 1616, which

took for his point of departure the researches of ARCHIMEDES, and he looked at it in a new way. based the first section of his work as a Stereometry of Archimedes, and it is followed with a Supplement to Archimedes; but what progress since Archimedes! Archimedes (KEPLER himself gives appreciation of this method) used an indirect method, Kepler on the other hand goes straight to the point. The circumference consists of many straight parts that

can distinguish with points, their number is therefore infinitely large. On each of the parts taken as a base there exists a triangle which is measured by half the product of its height or the radius of the circumference, the base, and the area of all these triangles added together, or the quadrature of the circle, is half the product of the radius times the circumference. It is a point of view very close to the one VIETE adopted in order to analyze the

contingency

angle.

Today

these

ideas

are

so

widespread that we have a hard time explaining that they were new and needed to be proclaimed. It was VIETE that had dared to see the circumference as a line, KEPLER who saw its area, and the same also for the sphere. He made the sphere consist of an infinite number of particles all having their apex at the center of the sphere and representing something like cone. The almost flat bases of these cones have the same area as the surface of the sphere. The volume Once of the sphere is therefore measured as one third of the product of the radius with the surface. KEPLER employed this method to the sphere, he had the courage to generalize it. He was in possession of all the volumes of work that Archimedes was studying, and, reassured by the coincidence of his results, he dared to advance into unknown areas. He sought the volume of certain bodies of revolution in ways never imagined before. This truly took courage. His calculations, his results are sometimes wrong, but despite it all it makes his way, and there was no one to follow who would take more precaution than KEPLER did.

The Doliometrie of 1616 illustrates the cubature of bodies by taking the sum of certain particles, KEPLER having from 1605-1609 found the sum of a series of

trigonometric functions multiplied by the average difference between the one and the other. He remarked that one thing that can be assumed is:

he confirmed the result by continuing beyond the series of sines. In modern language we would say he found:

by a calculation whose prolixity would frighten anyone else from the same time he calculated the orbit of the planet Marx. We can not leave KEPLER without noting that in his Doliometrie one can also see the first example of the problem of inverse tangents, to wit: to define a curve through the given properties of its tangent. Kepler was followed closely by CAVALIERI, author of the Geometry of indivisibles in 1635. I would be leading too far, if I elaborated on the origins of the considerations of CAVALIERI. The word indivisibles is scholastic. The word fluere, which is no longer used, belongs to the same period. PIERRE DE DACIE has made use of it; it is found in the edition of Euclid published by CLAVIUS in 1574, and in the description of logarithms of NEPER in 1614. It designates a continuous movement giving birth to a line, to a

surface, to a body. Cavalieri certainly read Clavius and Neper; he cites that he read Kepler in his preface; he had been in correspondence with Galileo who occupied himself with similar meditations. It is nonetheless true that Cavalieri had exceeded his predecessors by far, that he managed in the course of his research to recognize a theorem equivalent to the formula: