Many moons ago Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both claimed to have invented calculus. The feud began small, but then erupted into something much more. The math world became divided and sides were chosen. Do some research and see exactly how this quarrel developed.
"It was not until the 1704 publication of an anonymous review of Newton's tract on quadrature, a review implying that Newton had borrowed the idea of the fluxional calculus from Leibniz, that any responsible mathematician doubted that Leibniz had invented the calculus independently of Newton." This is what i found about the fight that developed between Newton and Leibniz.
ReplyDeleteAccording to a website I found discussing the controversy, "As the renowned author of Principia (1687) as well as a host of equally esteemed published works, it appears that Newton not only went much further in exploring the applications of calculus than Leibniz did, but he ventured down a different road. Leibniz and Newton had very different views of calculus in that Newton's was based on limits and concrete reality, while Leibniz focused more on the infinite and abstract (Struik, 1948)"
ReplyDeleteHowever, Newton seems to have been more "tight-lipped" than Leibniz, not letting others hear about his discovery, while Leibniz was telling people that he was onto "something big".
And personally, Newton's method seems much simpler and easy to use, even though all we've really gone into is notation, it still seems that Leibniz's method is clunky, and much more complicated than necessary.
In 1696, the two men were relatively peaceful towards each other, and had slightly regarded the other man's accomplishments and work. No one questioned either man's work as being non-independent until 1704, when Leibniz was accused of plagiarism. The case against Leibniz was summed up in the Commercium Epistolicum of 1712, which referenced all allegations. That document was thoroughly machined by Newton.
ReplyDeleteThe websites i found actually said that the two communicated with each other through letters quite often on the topic of mathematics and it seems to me that they both can lay a little claim to the "invention" of calculus. However, I dont believe it was an invention so much as a discovery because almost everything in math has always existed and its more of discovering rules and such than inventing them.
ReplyDeleteNewton claimed to have begun working on a form of the calculus in 1666, at the age of 23, but did not publish it except as a minor annotation in the back of one of his publications decades later. Gottfried Leibniz began working on his variant of the calculus in 1674, and in 1684 published his first paper employing it. L'Hopital published a text on Leibniz's calculus in 1696. Meanwhile, Newton did not explain his eventual fluxional notation for the calculus in print until 1693 and 1704.
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