The war of calculation

Brilliant, vain, and enemies. The Calculus Wars masterfully narrates the story of Newton, Leibniz, and the greatest mathematical clash of all time.

In the early 18th century, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz engaged in a dispute that lasted more than ten years and continued until the end of their lives. The giants of German and British mathematics, two of the greatest scientists of all time, fought bitterly and publicly over the authorship of calculus.

One of the most important intellectual legacies of the 17th century, calculus was first developed by Newton during the creative years of 1665 and 1666. He called it his method of fluxes and fluents. But the work was kept secret for most of his life. Newton only circulated a few private copies of his projects among friends and never published a single excerpt of his study on calculus.

This only came to pass decades later.

Leibniz devoted himself to calculus during his prolific years in Paris, around 1675. Although he was a lawyer and had no formal training in mathematics, within a few years he managed to harmonize all the discoveries of his contemporaries in this field and thus devised calculus. Over the next ten years, Leibniz refined his discovery and created a wholly original system of symbols and graphic representations. Although he was chronologically the second, he was the first to publish his system of calculus.

While today Leibniz and Newton are seen as independent co-inventors, and both are credited with providing the greatest impetus to mathematics since the Greeks, the story was different in the past. Accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty arose on both sides. At the height of the calculus wars, Leibniz and Newton attacked each other, both secretly and openly, through anonymously published articles and texts written by third parties.

The Calculus Wars is an accessible and fascinating book about "the greatest intellectual property debate of all time," according to the author. A work that reveals how Leibniz and Newton were geniuses, brilliant, vain, sometimes mad, and, ultimately, completely human.