Re^2: Empirically solving complex problems

So how did the "first mathemeticians", who didn't have the calculus formulas, figure out the area under the curve? Well, they did it just like the chemists. He divided the area under the curve into tall thin rectangles, of width x, and took the average value of the 2 y values at the top, got the area of the rectangles, and summed them up.

While conceptually I have no problem with this explanation, please do not confuse the concept with the historical approaches to finding the area inside a curve.

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Re^3: Empirically solving complex problems by zentara (Cardinal) on Mar 07, 2005 at 13:21 UTC
Yeah, that just goes to show, how "our world vision" is shaped by our educational processes. In my school, the origin began with DeCartes(with only footnotes to the Greeks). I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh	[reply]