what, no! Calculus was not hard to understand, it really wasn’t until the conceivement of real analysis that everyone lost their shit what it means for a function to be discontinuous. That, and well the Dirac delta function making a prescense in signals and physics.
I feel like the real tipping point for math was around the same time as physics, and for a similar reason. Quantum mechanics and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems touch at a similar sort of principle: there is a sort of conceptual bedrock beyond which logic fundamentally cannot extend.
That’s basically the same image but the timeline is split around the 1600s
what, no! Calculus was not hard to understand, it really wasn’t until the conceivement of real analysis that everyone lost their shit what it means for a function to be discontinuous. That, and well the Dirac delta function making a prescense in signals and physics.
Agreed, but they asked about Newton’s contribution to math. He was alive in the early 1600s afaik
I feel like the real tipping point for math was around the same time as physics, and for a similar reason. Quantum mechanics and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems touch at a similar sort of principle: there is a sort of conceptual bedrock beyond which logic fundamentally cannot extend.