4 ms·
This was a surprising one for me: During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries: - *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*
by mritchie712 2y ago
This was a surprising one for me:
During Isaac Newton's time, several contemporaries were making similar scientific discoveries:
- *Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz*: Both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton formulated his version in the 1660s but didn't publish it immediately. Leibniz began his work on calculus in the 1670s and published his findings in the late 17th century. This led to a prolonged dispute over who first invented calculus.
- *Robert Hooke*: Hooke proposed ideas about planetary motion and gravitation. In the 1670s, he suggested that planets are attracted to the Sun by a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This concept influenced Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation, though the two scientists had intense arguments over the credit for this discovery.
- *James Gregory*: A Scottish mathematician, Gregory made significant contributions to calculus and series expansions. He discovered the series expansion for the inverse tangent function, known as Gregory's series, and worked on methods of calculating areas under curves, which are fundamental aspects of calculus.
These instances highlight the phenomenon of multiple discovery, where different scientists independently arrive at similar conclusions around the same time.
- christina97 2y agoThanks ChatGPT.
- FergusArgyll 2y agoWhen will people realize that pasting markdown is a dead giveaway?
- kragen 2y agoAnybody who publishes on GitHub, Reddit, or Stack Overflow is pretty familiar with some variant of Markdown. People have been accidentally posting Markdown on HN much longer than there have been LLMs.
- mritchie712 2y agowhy would I write that myself when chatgpt can do it 10x faster? I knew there were several people working on the same thing as Newton at the exact same time. I didn't know the exact dates and their names. What would you do, Google it all? Good choice.
- zokier 2y agoWhy post at all if you don't want to write the comment yourself?
- gitaarik 2y agoBecause you want to share the info? I found it interesting and relevant to the discussion. Why would you be a programmer at all if you're gonna let AI do the hard work? Why even use a keyboard, that's for people that really don't know how to write themselves.
- grokys 2y agoAt least Leibniz is still famous for the biscuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz-Keks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz-Keks
- zoky 2y agoThe fig Newton was invented first though. Seriously though, it’s a bit of an amusing coincidence that the Leibniz biscuit and the fig Newton were both independently invented in 1891 (at least according to Wikipedia).
- jshier 2y agoThough only the Leibniz is named for the philosopher, the Newton is named for the town in Massachusetts.
- btilly 2y agoWe still mostly use Leibniz' dy/dx notation. Newton's fluxions and y-dot (a dot over the y) notation are largely forgotten. The Hooke debate gave us a great quote from Newton. "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Hooke was a dwarf...)
- hydrogen7800 2y ago~20 years ago in school, I encountered dy/dx and y-dot with about equal frequency (and maybe y' & f'(x)) in engineering and calculus courses. Engineering favored the dots.
- rtkwe 2y agoI went though most of a pure math degree along side my CS degree and I don't think I ever saw ẏ used, mathematics as far as I know basically completely adopted the Leibniz notation.
- btilly 2y agoI got most of the way to a PhD and only saw y-dot in one differential equations course.
- abhgh 2y agoSame here, and also agree with the "prime" notation, i.e., y'! One of my instructors had joked that the dot/prime notations saved printing costs in the days when printing was expensive - not sure if there is any truth to that.
- Henchman21 2y agoThe show “Connections” with James Burke does a wonderful job of highlighting these sorts of overlapping of ideas and people and their collective results. Old, but well worth a watch! https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978 https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978
- glitcher 2y agoI'm reading "The Secret Lives of Numbers" which has some fascinating deep dives into lesser taught math history (at least in western culture), including the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in India where significant contributions to calculus were made in the 1500's well before Newton and Leibniz!