ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

History of calculus

Hey there little one! Today, we're going to learn about the history of calculus! Now, calculus is a fancy word for a part of math that helps us understand how things change over time, like how fast a car is going or how quickly a plant is growing.

A long time ago, before you were born, there were two really smart people named Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who were trying to figure out how to use math to understand these types of changes. They didn't know each other, but they both came up with similar ideas around the same time!

Newton came up with something called "fluxions," which was a way to figure out the rate of change of something over time. Leibniz, on the other hand, came up with something called "differentials," which was another way to do the same thing. This all happened in the late 1600s and early 1700s!

Eventually, other smart people started using these ideas to do all sorts of cool things, like figuring out how to predict the motion of planets or calculating the slope of a line. Calculus became a really important part of math and science, and we still use it today to solve all sorts of problems.

So there you have it, the history of calculus! It all started with two really smart guys who wanted to understand how things change over time. Pretty cool, huh?