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The history and roots of calculus can be traced back as far as Archimedes. Some of the main precursory philosophers and mathematicians before the explosion of calculus in the 17th century movement of the Scientific Revolution were Kepler, who approximated volumes of solids of revolution with the sum of numerous thin layers; Galileo, who recognized that the area under the time/velocity curve represented the distance that something traveled;and Fermat, who had methods on finding maximum's and minimum's of polynomial functions and how they relate to the modern method of finding a derivative of a function and setting it equal to zero. Fermat was also known as the creator of differential calculus.(4) Then in the 17th Century by means of a coalescence of concepts and understandings of mathematics, Newton and Leibniz created the calculus that we know today (5).
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