In mathematics, the derivative is a mapping associated to another mapping, which measures the instantaneous rate of change at a point. Calculus is mostly the study of the derivative and its implications. When calculus is all dressed up in its fancy clothes, it is called analysis and constitutes a very large branch of mathematics.

See noaseboar's writeup below for the definition. I might add that the nth derivative of a mapping f: X → Y can be regarded as living in the space of symmetric n-multilinear maps X → Y, which is naturally isomorphic to Hom(Symn X, Y) where Symn X is the nth symmetric power of X. See Geometric measure theory by H. Federer for a careful treatment of the multilinear algebra of geometric calculus, which can get tricky.