"The history of modern mathematics is to an astonishing degree the history of the calculus. This calculus was the first great achievement of mathematics since the Greeks and it dominated mathematical exploration for centuries. The questions it answered and... raised lay at the heart of man's understanding of not only geometry and number, but also space and time and mathematical truth. It began with the surprising unification of two rather different geometrical problems, and almost immediately its ideas bore fruit in dozens of seemingly unrelated areas. The methods it developed gave the physical sciences an impetus without parallel in history, for through them natural science was born, and without them physics could not have progressed much further than the mystical vortices of Descartes."