History
Harvard University is older than calculus.
Harvard was founded in 1636. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed calculus independently in the 1660s and 1670s, and it was not published until the 1680s.
Why is this true?
Harvard was set up mainly to train clergy, and its early curriculum was Latin, Greek, Hebrew and theology. It is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States.
More facts in this category
More about history
History keeps producing facts that ruin your sense of time. A war shorter than a lunch break, an empire that overlaps with the invention of the fax machine, a queen who lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids. The entries here favour events with solid documentation, and each one explains the context that makes the surprise make sense rather than leaving it as a bare curiosity.