---
title: "List of multiple discoveries"
chunk: 1/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:44:22.470419+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. "Sometimes", writes Merton, "the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."
Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to such famous historic instances. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.
Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton"—a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together.
The distinction may blur as science becomes increasingly collaborative.
A distinction is drawn between a discovery and an invention, as discussed for example by Bolesław Prus. However, discoveries and inventions are inextricably related, in that discoveries lead to inventions, and inventions facilitate discoveries; and since the same phenomenon of multiplicity occurs in relation to both discoveries and inventions, this article lists both multiple discoveries and multiple inventions.

== 3rd century BCE ==

Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BCE) was the first known originator of a heliocentric (solar) system. Such a system was formulated again some 18 centuries later by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543).

== 13th century CE ==
1242 – first description of the function of pulmonary circulation, in Egypt, by Ibn al-Nafis. Later independently rediscovered by the Europeans Michael Servetus (1553) and William Harvey (1616).

== 14th century ==

1370: Gresham's (Copernicus') law: Nicole Oresme (c. 1370); Nicolaus Copernicus (1519); Thomas Gresham (16th century); Henry Dunning Macleod (1857). Ancient references to the same concept include one in Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs (405 BCE), which compares bad politicians to bad coin (bad politicians and bad coin, respectively, drive good politicians and good coin out of circulation).

== 16th century ==

Galileo Galilei and Simon Stevin: heavy and light balls fall together (contra Aristotle).
Galileo Galilei and Simon Stevin: Hydrostatic paradox (Stevin c. 1585, Galileo c. 1610).
1520: Scipione dal Ferro (1520) and Niccolò Tartaglia (1535) independently developed a method for solving cubic equations.
Olbers' paradox (the "dark-night-sky paradox") was described by Thomas Digges in the 16th century, by Johannes Kepler in the 17th century (1610), by Edmond Halley and by Jean-Philippe de Chéseaux in the 18th century, by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers in the 19th century (1823), and definitively by Lord Kelvin in the 20th century (1901); some aspects of Kelvin's argument had been anticipated in the poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe's essay, Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), which also presaged by three-quarters of a century the Big Bang theory of the universe.
1596: Continental drift, in varying independent iterations, was proposed by Abraham Ortelius (Ortelius 1596), Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (Snider-Pellegrini 1858), Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Lyell, Franklin Coxworthy (between 1848 and 1890), Roberto Mantovani (between 1889 and 1909), William Henry Pickering (1907), Frank Bursley Taylor (1908), and Alfred Wegener (1912). In addition, in 1885 Eduard Suess had proposed a supercontinent Gondwana and in 1893 the Tethys Ocean, assuming a land-bridge between the present continents submerged in the form of a geosyncline; and in 1895 John Perry had written a paper proposing that the Earth's interior was fluid, and disagreeing with Lord Kelvin on the age of the Earth.

== 17th century ==

1604: Oxygen was described by Michael Sendivogius; in 1771–72, by Carl Wilhelm Scheele; in 1774, by Joseph Priestley; and in 1777, as a chemical element, by Antoine Lavoisier.
1610: Sunspots – Thomas Harriot (England, 1610), Johannes and David Fabricius (Frisia, 1611), Galileo Galilei (Italy, 1612), Christoph Scheiner (Germany, 1612).
1614: Logarithms – John Napier (Scotland, 1614) and Joost Bürgi (Switzerland, 1618).
Analytic geometry – René Descartes, Pierre de Fermat.
1654: Problem of points solved by both Pierre de Fermat (France, 1654), Blaise Pascal (France, 1654), and Christiaan Huygens (Holland, 1657).
Calculus – Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
1662: Boyle's law (sometimes referred to as the "Boyle-Mariotte law") is one of the gas laws and basis of derivation for the ideal gas law, which describes the relationship between the product pressure and volume within a closed system as constant when temperature remains at a fixed measure. The law was named for chemist and physicist Robert Boyle, who published the original law in 1662. The French physicist Edme Mariotte discovered the same law independently of Boyle in 1676.
1671: Newton–Raphson method – Isaac Newton (Newton's work was written in 1669 and 1671, but not published until 1736) and Joseph Raphson (1690).
1683: Determinants – Seki Takakazu (Japan, 1683 or earlier) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Germany, 1693).
1696: Brachistochrone problem solved by Johann Bernoulli, Jakob Bernoulli, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Guillaume de l'Hôpital, and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. The problem was posed in 1696 by Johann Bernoulli, and its solutions were published next year.
1698: Steam engine: Patent granted to Thomas Savery in 1698. The invention has often been credited to Thomas Newcomen (1712). Other early inventors have included Taqī al-Dīn (1551), Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1606), Giambattista della Porta, Giovanni Branca (1629), Cosimo de' Medici (1641), Evangelista Torricelli (1643), Otto Von Guericke (1672), Denis Papin (1679), and many others.

== 18th century ==