Is Harvard older than calculus?

Calculus feels ancient, the kind of thing that must have arrived with geometry and the Greeks. It did not. The mathematics of change, the tools that let you work out speeds and curves and areas, was invented in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the two men who invented it independently argued for the rest of their lives about who was first.

Newton did the work in 1665 and 1666 while Cambridge University was closed because of plague and he was sitting at home in Lincolnshire. He then told almost nobody for twenty years. Leibniz, in Germany, developed his own version and published it in 1684, with the notation we still use today.

Harvard College, meanwhile, had been established by the Massachusetts legislature in 1636, when Newton was not yet born. Its first students studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, logic and rhetoric, and arithmetic of a sort, but not a derivative in sight, because nobody had one. The college is older than the subject that now fills its lecture halls.