Kinematics

Kinematics dates back to the 14th century, and it’s possible that Greek scholars like Archimedes studied motion.

One of the first known discoveries in kinematics was the Merton Rule. The Merton Rule was discovered by scholars at Oxford college, which stated that an object with constant acceleration will travel so that the average velocity will be equal to the average of the initial and final velocities. In the 17th century, Galileo discovered that, ignoring air resistance and wind, objects fall with constant acceleration.

In the 1670s, Sir Isaac Newton started to work on kinematics, clarifying ideas of acceleration, displacement, and velocity, and how these were related through derivatives and integrals.

After Newton, much of kinematics is finding applications to what he had discovered.