The Transition to Calculus

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provided the tradition of experience with symbolism that would allow the calculus to flourish. Beginning with Francois Viete, who invented symbolic systems, the mathematicians of this period made great gains on the past. Unfettered by tradition, unhampered by political or economic issues, the mathematicians of this period were able to create a new mathematics into which ideas, not just new results, could be inserted.

Mathematicians such as Descartes and Fermat were of such a caliber, that their efforts proved to be the final "philosophical" unshakling of mathematics and science whose fruits would be realized only a century later.

	Goals
	Readings
	Problems

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