Calculus was "invented" through the 17th century primarily by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Lebniz, though throughout time it has seen many attempts of understanding certain mathematical concepts. As early as 1820 BC in Egypt saw attempts to understand areas and volumes of objects, and by the mid 1600s, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Lebniz began to take the reigns of calculus and develop theories and ideas that we still reference today.
Calculus has historically been referred to as "Calculus of infinitesimals", also coined by Gottfried Lebniz, which refers to the calculations of things so infinitely small that they might as well be zero (though they are not zero), which could reference things such as limits, continuity, or derivatives. The concept of infinitesimals are used to manipulate or understand the behavior of certain lines, such as finding their slopes or their limits.
The concept of infinitesimals connects differential calculus and limits in that both deal with concepts that require an infinitely small definition of some feature of an equation. Limits are an infinitely small way of showing that an equation will approach a certain number but will never achieve it, though the difference between the equation and that number will grow infinitely smaller as the equation approaches that number. In differential calculus, derivatives can be taken at any point of a continuous line to find the slope between any two points, which can have an infinitely small difference between them, indicating another limit of sorts, just in this case the limit is the slope between two points, infinitely close to each other.
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