Chapter 3 of the Book of Ecclesiastes begins with a poem, ‘For everything there is a season: a time to be born and a time to die;’ and concludes ‘a time of war and a time of peace’.
This is very thought-provoking and clear, but verse 5 is not; ‘A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them’.
After puzzling over this I saw that ‘calculus’ is Latin for stones and things became clear. The second half of the verse must mean the collecting of small stones into a heap. Since integration is the summation of many small elements, the second half can be translated ‘there is a time for integral calculus’, so the first half must mean ‘there is a time for differential calculus’.
Ecclesiastes was a teacher of mathematics!
Seen in The Mathematical Gazette November 1998 Volume 82 Number 495
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