this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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The joke is that calculus as a field of mathematics didn't exist until millennia after the fall of the empire
Astrology was so important to the Greeks, they figured out the elliptical orbits of the planets (up to Jupiter) and how to compute them without calculus.
Right, I'm not denying that. People have always been smart. The problem that calculus solved was the intensely difficult algebra that it replaced
ironically, algebraists are currently trying to replace calculus with more algebra. needless to say, the algebra involved is pretty extreme