About the author
Gary Chan is a maths tutor at OPCentro Tuition and currently running year 12 maths lessons on weekend.

What is Calculus?

Calculus is a powerful tool that help us build bridges, design spaceships, perform medical research, create 3D games, etc. Calculus is a nightmare that haunts thousands of high school students and even university students. What exactly calculus is?


Calculus is a branch of mathematics that was developed in seventeenth century independent by two great mathematicians, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727). There are two primary branches of calculus, differential calculus and integral calculus.


Differential calculus is a study of how things change. To be more precise, it is a study that concerns the rate of change, and it provides a mathematical framework for modelling systems that evolve continuously. For example, when you drive a car, your position changes continuously and if you know your position all the time, you can work out the rate of change of position, i.e. your speed, with differential calculus.


Integral calculus is a study of area and volume. How much paint do you need to color a circle? How much water do you need to fill up a ball? Integral calculus provides a way for doing all these calculation.


Who would use calculus? To what area is calculus applied?

A wide range of careers use calculus regularly. Biologists use differential calculus to determine the rate of growth of bacteria under different settings; civil engineer use integral calculus to work out the amount of materials that are required to build a bridge; financial analyst use calculus to maximize portfolio gains. Indeed, we can see the trace of calculus in every aspect of our daily life, despite its mystique as a complex branch of mathematics.


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