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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multiple discovery | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:38:20.249298+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Civility == After Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had exchanged information on their respective systems of calculus in the 1670s, Newton in the first edition of his Principia (1687), in a scholium, apparently accepted Leibniz's independent discovery of calculus. In 1699, however, a Swiss mathematician suggested to Britain's Royal Society that Leibniz had borrowed his calculus from Newton. In 1705 Leibniz, in an anonymous review of Newton's Opticks, implied that Newton's fluxions (Newton's term for differential calculus) were an adaptation of Leibniz's calculus. In 1712 the Royal Society appointed a committee to examine the documents in question; the same year, the Society published a report, written by Newton himself, asserting his priority. Soon after Leibniz died in 1716, Newton denied that his own 1687 Principia scholium "allowed [Leibniz] the invention of the calculus differentialis independently of my own"; and the third edition of Newton's Principia (1726) omitted the tell-tale scholium. It is now accepted that Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus independently of each other. In another classic case of multiple discovery, the two discoverers showed more civility. By June 1858 Charles Darwin had completed over two-thirds of his On the Origin of Species when he received a startling letter from a naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, 13 years his junior, with whom he had corresponded. The letter summarized Wallace's theory of natural selection, with conclusions identical to Darwin's own. Darwin turned for advice to his friend Charles Lyell, the foremost geologist of the day. Lyell proposed that Darwin and Wallace prepare a joint communication to the scientific community. Darwin being preoccupied with his mortally ill youngest son, Lyell enlisted Darwin's closest friend, Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens, and together on 1 July 1858 they presented to the Linnean Society a joint paper that brought together Wallace's abstract with extracts from Darwin's earlier, 1844 essay on the subject. The paper was also published that year in the Society's journal. Neither the public reading of the joint paper nor its publication attracted interest; but Wallace, "admirably free from envy or jealousy," had been content to remain in Darwin's shadow.
== See also ==
== References and notes ==
== Further reading == Lamb, David, and S.M. Easton, chapter 9: Originality in art and science, Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress, Amersham, Avebury Publishing, 1984, ISBN 0861270258. Colin McGinn, "Groping Toward the Mind" (review of George Makari, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, Norton, 656 pp., $39.95; and A.C. Grayling, The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind, Bloomsbury, 351 pp., $30.00), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 11 (June 23, 2016), pp. 67–68. Merton, Robert K. (1996). Sztompka, Piotr (ed.). On Social Structure and Science. Chicago, IL, USA: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-52070-4. Merton, Robert K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago, IL, USA: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226520919. Whalen, Eamon, "The Man Who Saw It Coming: Rob Wallace warned us that industrial agriculture could cause a deadly pandemic, but no one listened. Until now." (article on Rob Wallace and his books, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science and Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19), The Nation, vol. 313, no. 5 (September 6/13, 2021), pp. 14–19. Zuckerman, Harriet (1977). Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. New York, NY: The Free Press. ISBN 9780029357606.
== External links == "Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?", Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, May 12, 2008 The Technium: Simultaneous Invention, Kevin Kelly, May 9, 2008 Apperceptual: The Heroic Theory of Scientific Development at the Wayback Machine (archived May 12, 2008), Peter Turney, January 15, 2007