Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003)

Re:Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) by wool_gather on Sunday July 14, 2019 @12:22PM (#20434270)

Let's clarify here: "Calculus"[0] and the lambda calculus have almost nothing to do with one another. They just share a word in their name, like the Department of Mathematics and the Fire Department. There are several different things called "the X calculus".

[0]:Could be called "numerical calculus" or "calculus of integration and differentiation", perhaps.

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Re:Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) by JoelMcCracken on Sunday July 14, 2019 @12:36PM (#20434336)

A while back I was trying to under why some things are called algebras and others calculus. The answer I got is that the term calculus is related to the introduction/reduction of variables or symbols, whereas an algebra is manipulation of existing symbols.

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Re:Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) by mruts on Sunday July 14, 2019 @01:37PM (#20434655)

I always thought it related to continuous variables and the highly useful concept of the infinitesimal. But maybe that definition works as well.

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Re:Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) by User23 on Sunday July 14, 2019 @03:30PM (#20435420)

I thought it was just yet another historical and linguistic oddity in English.

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Re:Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) by mruts on Sunday July 14, 2019 @04:07PM (#20435655)

Calculus means "stone" in Latin. I suspect the relationship between stones and counting is why we use it so much (though I'm not an expert on how/why Romans used stones).

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Re:Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) by User23 on Sunday July 14, 2019 @03:29PM (#20435416)

Good clarification, but I wouldn't say almost nothing. All are formal symbolic reasoning techniques.

For example, The predicate calculus is invaluable for writing correct programs with mind-bogglingly large input domains, such as the set of all C++ programs.

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Re:Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003) by mlevental on Sunday July 14, 2019 @08:09PM (#20437123)

historically they were called the differential calculus and the integral calculus

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