ExtractWolfgang Breidert In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the development of mathematics was founded on two important innovations: The first was during the Middle Ages: The interest in infinity caused an enormous increase in theology and, as a consequence, its employment in science and culture was intensely stimulated. This movement initiated the now famous changes in cosmology by the conceptions of infinity in space and time, and in mathematics by the invention of the calculus (Leibniz’s infinitesimals, Newton’s fluxions) . Nicholas of Cusa said ‘mathematical things are finite’, but the enthusiasm for infinity beyond theology increased, as is paradigmatically marked by the Spanish scholar Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz in a sentence in 1670: ‘In every science there are infinite worlds; each of them is infinitely extended. ’ The second movement of mathematical innovation was the increasing importance of signs for mathematical variables and the use of symbols in algebra. Since...