This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Isaac Newton developed his method of fluxions privately in the 1660s and did not publish it. Leibniz developed differential and integral calculus independently, in Paris, between 1672 and 1676, and published his own notation, the integral sign and the d for a differential, in 1684, years before Newton put his own method into print. For a while this bothered nobody. Then, in 1699, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a young Swiss mathematician and a friend of Newton's, made a passing accusation in print that Leibniz had stolen the idea. Leibniz, still trying to keep the dispute civil, answered that it would be a ridiculous spectacle if learned men traded insults like fishwives. It did not stay civil. By 1705 Newton's allies had made the case for his sole priority explicit in an anonymous review, and Leibniz answered in kind, in public, in the Acta Eruditorum, accusing Newton's side of plagiarism right back. The dispute reached its formal climax in 1713, when the Royal Society, whose president was Newton, appointed a committee to investigate. Newton picked the committee. Not one of its members was a Continental mathematician, meaning not one of them was likely to side with Leibniz. Newton guided its deliberations and, by the account historians now generally accept, secretly wrote much of its own final report himself. The committee found, unsurprisingly, that Newton held sole priority. Historians of mathematics today set that verdict aside as exactly what a self-selected, self-authored inquiry would produce, and hold instead that both men reached calculus on their own: Newton first in private, Leibniz first into print. The Royal Society investigated a dispute in which its own president was the accuser, the judge, and, it turned out, most of the jury.