Before Newton

[Quartz]

August 16, 2007 New research suggests that a key aspect of the calculus, commonly attributed to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz in the late 1600s, may in fact have been discovered more than two centuries earlier by scholars at the KeralaSchool in southwest India.


There is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century.

Go to
http://www.gizmag.com/go/7800/
for more info

Ken

[WaltzCee]

from wiki:


Archimedes is generally considered to be the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time. He used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave a remarkably accurate approximation of Pi.

Archimedes (c. 287 BC - c. 212 BC) beat Newton too.