Discrete Calculus by Analogy

With its origins stretching back several centuries, discrete calculus is now an increasingly central methodology for many problems related to discrete systems and algorithms. The topics covered here usually arise in many branches of science and technology, especially in discrete mathematics, numerical analysis, statistics and probability theory as well as in electrical engineering, but our viewpoint here is that these topics belong to a much more general realm of mathematics; namely calculus and differential equations because of the remarkable analogy of the subject to this branch of mathemati