Author: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader / Source: Today I Found Out
Calculus involves the study of limits. By the time they were done arguing about who had invented it, Isaac Newton and G. W. Leibniz had probably both reached their limit as well.
Science has seen a number of simultaneous discoveries. Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry independently discovered electromagnetic induction.
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both hit upon the idea of natural selection. None of these coincidences, however, snowballed into an argument as ugly as the one that developed between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the invention of calculus.THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
Newton didn’t like to publish. He was one of the most innovative thinkers of his day, making breakthroughs in physics and mathematics that inspired vast new fields of study, but he never felt his work was quite ready to go to the printer—he always wanted to make changes or write another draft. Because of his hesitation, he didn’t get any of his work on calculus into print until 1704. Leibniz, a leading philosopher and mathematician, beat him to the punch by publishing a brief summary in the Leipzig periodical Acta Eruditorum in October 1684.
However, Newton had planted a few clues about his pioneering work in calculus. Starting in 1676, he circulated unfinished papers privately among his friends that hinted at calculus concepts. Two letters about calculus topics even went to Leibniz that year. But his first public hint was in his greatest work published in his lifetime, Principia Mathematica (1687), when Newton tossed in a theorem about differentiation, one of the basic operations of calculus.
In fact, in a note on this theorem, Newton revealed a secret message from one of his letters to Leibniz. In this letter, Newton had concealed the meaning of a sentence by jumbling all of its letters. The secret message was “Given any equation involving flowing quantities, to find the fluxions, and vice-versa.” When Newton wrote the letter, he had wanted to establish proof that he had discovered a fundamental theorem of calculus, but he didn’t want Leibniz to know it, so he scrambled all the letters of it together. That way, he could point to it later for proof, but Leibniz couldn’t steal it.
Never mind that no one knew what “fluxions” were, since Newton had invented the word. Also never mind that Leibniz couldn’t read the message because the letters were all out of order. Newton’s point was that he had staked a claim to the concepts in 1676, even though the secret message didn’t really communicate anything to Leibniz…or anyone else.
THE TROUBLE MULTIPLIES
At first, Newton and Leibniz were both inclined to give the other credit for being an independent discoverer. It was their friends who really turned them against each other. It started in 1696 when a friend of Leibniz published a challenge problem that required calculus in the Leipzig Acta hoping that Newton wouldn’t be able to solve it, thus proving that Newton had stolen calculus…
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