Because they [the ancient Greeks] feared infinite processes they missed the limit process. In approximating a circle by a polygon they were content t… - Morris Kline

While the mathematicians were still looking askance at the Greek gift of the irrational number, the Hindus of India were preparing another brain-teaser, the negative number, which they introduced about A.D. 700. The Hindus saw that when the usual, positive numbers were used to represent assets, it was helpful to have other number represent debts.

The Greeks failed to comprehend the infinitely large, the infinitely small, and infinite processes. They "shrank before the silence of the infinite spaces."

To the scientists of 1850, Hamilton's principle was the realization of a dream. ...from the time of Galileo scientists had been striving to deduce as many phenomena of nature as possible from a few fundamental physical principles. ...they made striking progress ...But even before these successes were achieved Descartes had already expressed the hope and expectation that all the laws of science would be derivable from a single basic law of the universe. This hope became a driving force in the late eighteenth century after Maupertuis's and Euler's work showed that optics and mechanics could very likely be unified under one principle. Hamilton's achievement in encompassing the most developed and largest branches of physical science, mechanics, optics, electricity, and magnetism under one principle was therefore regarded as the pinnacle of mathematical physics.