Building upon pioneering work by Kepler, Fermat, Cava- lieri, Gregory, Wallis, Barrow and others, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invented calculus in the 17th century. While immediately acquiring an enthusiastic following, the new methods proved to be controversial in the eyes of some of their contemporaries, who employed the more traditional methods of their predecessors. One of the controversial aspects of the new technique was Leibniz's distinction between assignable and unassignable quantities (including infinitesimals and infinite quantities).
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