ABSTRACT
This chapter has two sections which position calculus over time and at a point in time. The first section visits the history of calculus and outlines major landmarks from Archimedes to Leibniz and Newton to the arithmetisation of calculus in the 19th century. The second section considers school and beginning university calculus curricula in a number of countries. For millennia, mathematicians around the globe tackled the general problem of how to find the area of regions with curved edges. The advent of coordinate geometry in the 1630s led to the study of a range of curves generated by simple algebraic equations. One of the key mathematical concepts emerging from Newton’s and Leibniz’s development of calculus was the early idea of function. Rather, students focus on conceptualizing quantities involved in situations and modeling their rate of change with respect to one another.
