The word calculus comes from the Latin word that means “little stone, pebble”. Over 2,000 years ago, Romans would add things up by using little pebbles or stones that represented particular numbers, as on an abacus. Later, the word ‘calculus’ came to mean not just the pebble used in counting, but a counting system itself. Much more recently, it came to refer to the modern branch of mathematics, which was invented in the 17th century. The word ‘calculus’ is also the source of the Latin word calculare meaning “to add up”, which gives us the word ‘calculate’. The word is also used to describe a hard stone that forms in the kidney or gallbladder.
In mathematics education, calculus denotes courses of elementary mathematical analysis, which are mainly devoted to the study of functions and limits. The word calculus (plural calculi) is a Latin word, meaning originally “small pebble” (this meaning is kept in medicine – see Calculus (medicine)). Because such pebbles were used for counting (or measuring) a distance travelled by transportation devices in use in ancient Rome,[5] the meaning of the word has evolved and today usually means a method of computation. It is therefore used for naming specific methods of calculation and related theories, such as propositional calculus, Ricci calculus, calculus of variations, lambda calculus, and process calculus.
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