Talk:Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy

The 5th point in "The quarrel"
There is mention to "#5" in the section "The quarrel", however the list stops at #4. Was a fifth point of contention removed at some point? Does it need to be re-added, or does the section need to be edited to no longer address it? B-Con (talk) 17:55, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

You are correct. I accidentally placed the note in the wrong section (twice), having had technical difficulties in editing ('pilot failure' would be more accurate). This seems an outdated page (with a touch of the weird, i.e. 'did Newton not-plagiarize anything!' or words to that effect, at some point--so I've merely removed my bit, at least for the moment. Maybe more properly, later66.108.248.77 (talk) 12:11, 7 August 2015 (UTC)CA 2015;

xkcd
People keep adding (me one of them) and removing the xkcd reference. Please explain why it doesn't belong in the "In Popular Culture" section here so it doesn't keep getting added and removed. Freddicus (talk) 21:16, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

How do we know that Newton discovered it besides his word
I know there are Newton followers who claimed that Newton shared the calculus with them before Leibniz's discovery. Besides their word it there any proof? Who were these people? I have never seen any solid evidence that clears Newton's name beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not steal the calculus from Leibniz and would like toknow if such evidence exists beyond his word and the word of some of this followers (who already were proven to be unreliable during the nasty dispute).

The more I learn about Newton, it seems that he might have stolen just about everything he is credited with. Does anyone have a list of his discoveries that are not shrouded in controversy?

It is so obvious that Liebniz discovered calculus. He is being surpressed by monoply men, because him, and Bernulli, knew besler, who invented a free energy wheel, which Liebniz wrote that it worked. SlickWillyLovesSex (talk) 06:28, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Merger
Pls discuss at 66.108.248.77 (talk) 11:57, 7 August 2015 (UTC)Calculus controversy: Newton v. Leibniz]]. Cheers, JackyR 23:39, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Invented vs Discovered
It is a question that had been the cause of a major intellectual controversy over who first invented the calculus...

I believe that the word invented should be replaced with discovered. I am under the impression that most mathematicians believe that mathematics is not "invented" by human inteligence. Rather, it is revealed or discovered by it. G9615111 02:09, 7 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Anything one imagines is real, if and only, if it is well-defined. So, the awareness of knowledge itself is derived from imagination, and if it must be imagined, then it follows it has always existed. Therefore, knowledge is discovered, never invented. As the saying goes: There is nothing new under the sun. From this one can logically infer that future inventions have always existed. It's just that we have not the time to imagine them all. 60.1.53.197 (talk) 09:29, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Isaac Barrow
What about him? It was my impression that he discovered what is now known as the "fundamental theorem of calculus", and he was Newton's advisor.Likebox 04:15, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

"That document was thoroughly machined by Newton." What does this mean? Please clarify. Xxanthippe 23:24, 20 October 2007 (UTC).

References, please!
An article on such a controversial subject matter, needs more direct references to sources. Also, the language needs to be way more NPOV. --24.86.252.26 18:12, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

new evidence is a hoax
I removed the following from the article. It's a hoax.


 * Article on new evidence found An article on new correspondence found very recently between Leibniz and Newton which could potentially rewrite the history presented above. A book and more scholarly articles is forthcoming on this project. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.86.252.26 (talk) 18:46, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

This article is incredibly biased
I vote that the neutrality of this article be reviewed due to severe bias. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chrismaster (talk • contribs) 22:28, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Not only is it biased, it's no longer relevant. The first rigorous formulation of calculus appeared in 2002.

60.1.47.118 (talk) 06:07, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

I Removed "If science worked then as it does now..."
I removed the statement: "If science worked then as it does now, Leibniz would be considered the sole inventor of the calculus since he published first." since

1. It is not true as for example in US in case of patent priority disputes who publishes first is not relevant the only thing that matters is who had the idea first and all evidence is taken into account.

2. Even if it were true it would be irrelevant to the article since science did not work then the way it does now.

3. The whole idea that publication date should decide on such matters is silly as there are many inventors who never publish and by that rule they could never claim any inventions. Enemyunknown (talk) 18:47, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

-- Yep. Counterfactuals tend to be held in low regard by historians because they just project the biases of the current on the past, which makes them completely incapable of holding any useful insight 121.45.248.150 (talk) 11:18, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Leibniz discovered calculus
IT is so true. It is sited in many mathmatics sourcebooks. Newton was a fraud. —Preceding unsigned comment added by WaveEtherSniffer (talk • contribs) 22:08, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Neither of them were frauds. But they were both wrong. 60.1.44.71 (talk) 02:45, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Archimedes developed calculus
So this news should be added eventually: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8974/title/A_Prayer_for_Archimedes —Preceding unsigned comment added by P1415926535 (talk • contribs) 21:34, 30 January 2009 (UTC)
 * This article is strictly about the Leibniz / Newton priority dispute. There are other articles more relevant to your concern (e.g., Archimedes Palimpsest and History of calculus). &mdash; Myasuda (talk) 15:09, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The Science News article linked to above seems highly misleading. It says:
 * The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized.

It's just as if that was not known until after the book was sold in 1998 and the researchers referred to here started work.
 * Nonsense. Archimedes knew nothing about infinity, just as no one else after him knows anything about infinity. Furthermore, infinity has nothing to do with the methods of calculus or the reason these work. There is no such thing as infinity or infinitesimal - both concepts are ill-defined. 60.1.53.197 (talk) 09:34, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

It is true that they have found things that were not previously known. But the fact that Archimedes anticipated calculus, and many of the details of how he did that, were universally known long before that. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:45, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Review of Bardi's The Calculus Wars
In light of the "excoriating" and detailed review of Bardi's book in the latest AMS Notices (see ), it may be worth re-examining any of the article's information that was pulled from this text and it might be worth removing Bardi's book as a reference for this article. Of note, the book review mentions this Wikipedia article (see the last page) and laments the fact that there is no distinguishing between the authoritative reference (Hall's book) versus the non-authoritative reference (Bardi's book). &mdash; Myasuda (talk) 13:26, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * After checking the article history, I've removed all references to Bardi. The sentence to which Bardi was referenced has been in place at the article's inception.  The references to Bardi were added by  on February 16, 2008 with no article content specific to Bardis book being added. If in-line cites are needed in this article, Blank's AMS Notices review (link provided above) provides an excellent overview of the controversy as well as a list of quality references.  &mdash; Myasuda (talk) 14:39, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Portions of text copied from WW Rouse Ball
At least some of this article appears to have been copied word-for-word from the entry 'Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz' in W. W. Rouse Ball's A Short Account of the History of Mathematics. The first sentence, at least, is substantially plagiarized ('The last years of Leibniz's life, 1709–1716, were embittered by a long controversy with John Keill, Newton, and others, over whether Leibniz had discovered calculus independently of Newton, or whether he had merely invented another notation for ideas that were fundamentally Newton's') and subsequent fragments seem to have started out that way and been edited or augmented in the meantime ('The ideas of the infinitesimal calculus can be expressed either in the notation of fluxions or in that of differentials...'). Leftwinglocker (talk) 12:53, 12 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I've added a template. But the article needs a lot of work to remove the plagiarism entirely. Adpete (talk) 01:52, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The source is from 1908. One option might be to have a disclaimer such as used for the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica? Fotoguzzi (talk) 05:15, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Spinoza
Isn't there an undisputed(or at least well known and documented) case where Leibniz plagiarized Spinoza? That seems to substantially undermine any assumption of good faith on Leibniz's part. 75.84.186.29 (talk) 04:24, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Amusing as ever, how people try to apply today's standards to an incident that happened some 300 years ago... -- 195.137.217.234 (talk) 09:30, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

It does not matter any more.
Both Newton and Leibniz were wrong, so it does not really matter. The first rigorous formulation of calculus occurred in 2002. 60.1.44.71 (talk) 02:43, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Who Is This "He"?
"However, to view the development of calculus as entirely independent between the work of Newton and Leibniz misses the point that both had some knowledge of the methods of the other, and in fact worked together on some aspects, in particular power series, as is shown in a letter to Henry Oldenburg dated October 24, 1676 where he remarks that Leibniz had developed a number of methods, one of which was new to him."

Who the "he" is in the above sentence is not very clear: I'd guess Newton, but the pronoun should just be replaced by the person's name. GeneCallahan (talk) 12:25, 22 April 2014 (UTC)


 * The answer is that "he" is Newton:


 * http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Leibniz.html


 * Whether the linked site counts as a reliable source, I'm not sure. The section was confusing to me, too. Fotoguzzi (talk) 05:16, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Sentence "practical importance"
I am having huge problems with the following bolded sentence in the "Scientific priority in the 17th century" section: The discoverer, in addition to acquiring fame, was spared the need to prove that his result was not obtained using plagiarism. Also, practical importance could have priority if it was associated with the invention of new technical devices. A widespread strategy of attacking priority was to declare a discovery or invention not a major achievement, but only an improvement, using techniques known to everyone and therefore not requiring considerable skill of its author. In its current form, in this one sentence, "priority" switches from topic to comment for one sentence, then (as in the rest of the section), becomes topic again. Even in the best case, this is non-standard and very confusing. But then, more important, what does it mean? suggested the following interpretation: "practical importance takes precedence (or has priority) over, for instance, theoretical or esthetical importance" ( on my talk page, 5 Nov, 13:38) I don't see it, but even if this interpretation is correct, it is far from clear how the sentence advances our understanding of "Scientific priority in the 17th century" (section heading of the section we are discussing)?--91.64.37.35 (talk) 14:52, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I have a problem with the entire paragraph. It has a single citation at the end, so it's not clear whether the citation supports the entire paragraph, or merely the last sentence. This problem is compounded by the fact that the paragraph is written in clear and unambiguous English up to the three sentences you quote, and then becomes obscure and possibly wrong - which creates a suspicion that an editor has gone beyond the sourcing, and added their personal viewpoint. The three sentences you quote are all problematic. The first is logically wrong (you cannot defend yourself against accusations of plagiarism by sealing your discovery in an envelope if the idea has been kicking around in someone's head for 25 years; you will be accused of having heard about it from a friend of a friend etc.). The second is a very contorted way of expressing the concept of priority by "reducing to practice" found in 20th C patent law. It may be true of 17th C maths too, but it could be written much more clearly, and we need to know it's not a patent lawyer imposing his modern knowledge on the past. And the third sentence is written in a horribly ambiguous way; it's not clear whether the attacking of priority required little skill, or the discovering of the discovery required little skill, or whether the declaration of the discovery was carried out using techniques known to everyone, or the discovery itself was carried out by techniques known to everyone. If these three sentences are indeed supported by a source, I'd suggest a complete rewrite.
 * The discoverer could 'time-stamp' the moment of his discovery, and prove that he knew of it at the point the letter was sealed, and had not copied it from anything subsequently published. Nevertheless, where an idea was subsequently published in conjunction with its use in a particularly valuable context, this might take priority over an earlier discoverer's work, which had no obvious application. Further, a mathematician's claim could be belittled by counter-claims that he had not truly invented an idea, but merely improved on someone else's idea, an improvement that required little skill, and was based on facts that were already known. < but this text should not be used unless it's what the source supports. Elemimele (talk) 18:29, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
 * thank you so much, especially for your rewrite. Now, for the first time, I see what the sentence could possibly mean. I still think it's a truly horrible way of expressing that meaning (which might or might not be true), but at least I see a possibly meaning. I just assumed (based on the weird topic/comment switch) someone jumbled the nouns.--91.64.37.35 (talk) 22:45, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I just checked, my local university library has the book. When I am there next time (might be several weeks, given current covid situation) and I remember, I will check it out.--91.64.37.35 (talk) 22:49, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, I think this is 100% bonkers. But I won't interfere anymore. - DVdm (talk) 16:21, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes,, it is bonkers, because it totally changes the meaning. , are you sure that's what the source says? I can't edit or revert because I have absolutely no idea which of the two possible meanings (the one I expressed above, or Khajidha's) is correct. If the IP editor above managed to track down the actual source, we might be able to get this right. Elemimele (talk) 17:55, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
 * See : "... Secondly, he could provide a practical justification for higher-order differentials...". Seems to be much more compatible with the original wording. - DVdm (talk) 18:05, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

The only thing that makes sense is "priority could have practical importance if it was associated with the invention of new technical devices." Who had the idea first is very important when you are making things. You have to know who to pay for the rights to use an idea.--Khajidha (talk) 18:59, 6 November 2021 (UTC)


 * The only thing that makes sense is "Practical importance could have priority if it was associated with the invention of new technical devices." Good grief. You have to know why to pay for the rights to use an idea. - DVdm (talk) 19:05, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Do you even speak English? Because "Practical importance could have priority if it was associated with the invention of new technical devices" is gibberish.--Khajidha (talk) 19:24, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
 * This is where I have to abandon the discussion. - DVdm (talk) 19:47, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I am also really struggling with this. No, it's not gibberish. In fact it's a major subject of debate in patent law. It is not enough merely to have an idea; the idea must be "reduced to practice" in some way, which depending on who you are, could mean anything from "wrote down full practical details of exactly how to implement the idea and make it do something" to "made a working version". If you didn't reduce to practice, you didn't get to claim priority of having had the idea. This was to stop yesterday's science fiction from becoming tomorrow's patent problem; you can't claim to have invented the flying saucer without demonstrating that your saucer can fly. But returning to the 17th C when Newton and Leibnitz were having their ideas: the whole concept that you might have to pay to use someone else's intellectual idea had not yet happened. Patents didn't exist. You could freely nick anyone's idea and do what you wanted. Neither Newton nor Leibnitz expected that their claims to having invented calculus would bring them financial benefits from someone whose technical device used calculus. They just wanted the prestige of having been the first to think of calculus. And the argument comes down to this: Newton had his idea, scribbled it in the margin of a manuscript, and left it for a bit. But Leibnitz, who had the idea a bit later, actually published it, and used it to further whole swathes of mathematics. So Leibnitz' claim to being the father of Calculus is based on his having been the first to make practical use of it. His priority is based on his practical application (rather than prior discovery). That is what I believe the original version of this article was trying to say. But I don't have the source, so I can't write it. Elemimele (talk) 22:35, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
 * thanks for joining in. i wouldn't call it gibberish, but the sentence is extremely confusing and i don't think the average reader will understand it the way  explained. for me, and this is how this whole thing started, it didn't make any sense at all, it was so incomprehensible to me, i assumed the editor must have made a simple error, and based on the topic to comment switch, i assumed it was that the nouns were switched. Which was an incorrect assumption., I am not sure if we are talking on the same basis. In my 5Nov 14:06 contribution on my talk page, i already abandoned my original edit, which you reverted (for which I am now thankful). I do not want my edit to be reinstated. After Elemimele explained what it is supposed to mean, I can see the value of the idea. I still can not see the value of the sentence as written, which is at the very best confusing. I will try to get the source book and report back here. Thanks to everyone involved, but especially Elemimele, for i have genuinely learned something.--91.64.37.35 (talk) 14:48, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
 * It's all gone quiet on the subject above! No one came back with any checked sources. I have inserted almost exactly the text I suggested above, as I think it is probably what the original writer intended. I agree that the original writing wasn't very clear. If anyone actually has sight of the source, and my version isn't what the source supports, please do revert/rewrite. Elemimele (talk) 22:07, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
 * @Elemimele @Khajidha @DVdm - Hey, I am very sorry for this to have taken so long, but I genuinely haven't been to the library until today. I checked out the book, took pictures and uploaded them to imgur (i think is all copyrighted, so can't upload to commons): https://imgur.com/a/z6FBFJN - The reference in our article refers to page 4, but I uploaded the whole first part of the General Introduction for context. From page 12 on (not uploaded) is only "this book is about... in chapter 1 i will... in chapter 2 i will" and such stuffs. Hope this is - despite the very very long delay - still helpful. Have a great day and all the best. Your friendly IP user from November, tho with a new IP. 91.64.59.58 (talk) 16:41, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
 * After reading it twice, i feel like, whether in the original or in 's rephrasing, nothing approximating the bolded sentence can be found in Meli. 91.64.59.58 (talk) 20:32, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Hi, friendly IP address! Thanks for your work on this. Imgur isn't cooperating with me today, so I can't re-read your link. I read about 2/3rds of it in a big rush a few days ago, so I will write from memory. (1) There was one passing mention of patents in the book from which you extracted a few pages. It related to the argument between Hooke and Huygens about the watch balance-spring, and was therefore a very different situation to Leibnitz and Newton, who were not arguing about any such practical machine. The book author didn't go into detail. I think, if I'm remembering correctly, they just said the subject of scientific priority was connected with such patent things, without describing in any way the nature of the connection. I really don't think this is relevant or useful. (2) There was a lot more discussion on the correct behaviour of someone who builds on another's work. The book discusses this at length because it's important to the Leibnitz/Newton situation, and because it's complicated, with contemporary scientists not all taking the same line. Some argued that if you found you were working on something that another had already discovered, you were moral-bound to pass over all your work and let them get on with it. Others then argued that their work was completely unlike the previous person's, or wildly greater/better. My feeling is that the text we've ended up with in the article is not so far different from what's in this book. But if the sentence in bold were to vanish completely, nothing significant would be lost. I can't check page-numbers of references at the moment because of the Imgr situation! Elemimele (talk) 16:02, 25 March 2022 (UTC)