Method of Fluxions is a book by
Isaac Newton. The book was completed in 1671, and published in 1736.
Fluxions is Newton's term for
differential calculus (
fluents was his term for
integral calculus). He originally developed the method at
Woolsthorpe Manor during the closing of
Cambridge during the
Great Plague of London from 1665 to 1667, but did not choose to make his findings known (similarly, his findings which eventually became the
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica were developed at this time and hidden from the world in Newton's notes for many years).
Gottfried Leibniz developed his form of calculus independently around 1673, 7 years after
Newton had developed the basis for differential calculus, as seen in surviving documents like “the method of
fluxions and fluents..." from 1666. Leibniz however published his discovery of differential calculus in 1684, nine years before Newton formally published his fluxion
notation form of calculus in part during 1693. The calculus notation in use today is mostly that of Leibniz, although
Newton's dot notation for differentiation
for denoting derivatives with respect to time is still in current use throughout
mechanics and
circuit analysis.