High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Operational calculus, also known as operational analysis, is a technique by which problems in analysis, in particular differential equations, are transformed into algebraic problems, usually the problem of solving a polynomial equation. The idea of representing the processes of calculus, derivation and integration, as operators has a long history that goes back to Gottfried Leibniz. The mathematician Louis François Antoine Arbogast was one of the first to manipulate these symbols independently of the function to which they were applied.