structural:scholar_edition, linguistic:voice_change
Pre-calculus integration

The first documented systematic technique capable of determining integrals is the method of exhaustion of the ancient Greek astronomer Eudoxus and philosopher Democritus (ca. 370 BC), which sought to find areas and volumes by breaking them up into an infinite number of divisions for which the area or volume was known. This method was further developed and employed by Archimedes in the 3rd century BC and used to calculate the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, area of an ellipse, the area under a parabola, the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution, the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution, and the area of a spiral.

A similar method was independently developed in China around the 3rd century AD by Liu Hui, who used it to find the area of the circle. This method was later used in the 5th century by Chinese father-and-son mathematicians Zu Chongzhi and Zu Geng to find the volume of a sphere.

In the Middle East, Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, Latinized as Alhazen (c. 965 – c. 1040 AD) derived a formula for the sum of fourth powers. Alhazen determined the equations to calculate the area enclosed by the curve represented by y = x k {\displaystyle y=x^{k}} (which translates to the integral ∫ x k d x {\displaystyle \int x^{k}\,dx} in contemporary notation), for any given non-negative integer value of k {\displaystyle k}. He used the results to carry out what would now be called an integration of this function, where the formulae for the sums of integral squares and fourth powers allowed him to calculate the volume of a paraboloid.

The next significant advances in integral calculus did not begin to appear until the 17th century. At this time, the work of Cavalieri with his method of indivisibles, and work by Fermat, began to lay the foundations of modern calculus, with Cavalieri computing the integrals of x up to degree n = 9 in Cavalieri's quadrature formula. The case n = − 1 required the invention of a function, the hyperbolic logarithm, achieved by quadrature of the hyperbola in 1647.

Further steps were made in the early 17th century by Barrow and Torricelli, who provided the first hints of a connection between integration and differentiation. Barrow provided the first proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus. Wallis generalized Cavalieri's method, computing integrals of x to a general power, including negative powers and fractional powers.