Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1701 Leibniz helped draft the reasoning behind the Act of Settlement, the English law that would one day hand the British throne to his own employer's family, the House of Hanover. He spent years arguing, in print and in private memoranda, for the House of Hanover's claim. When the moment actually arrived, in August 1714, it did him no good at all. Queen Anne died, the Elector Georg Ludwig became King George I of Great Britain, and the court that had employed Leibniz for nearly four decades packed up for London without him. He was, by his own account, ordered to stay behind and finish a commissioned history of the House of Brunswick he had been dragging his feet on for years. He never saw London. He never saw the king he had helped put there again in any capacity that mattered. What he did instead, in that same year, alone in Hanover with a project nobody at court cared whether he finished, was write the Monadology: ninety numbered paragraphs distilling a lifetime of metaphysics into their most compressed form. It was not published in his lifetime. Leibniz had spent his career defending a world in which nothing happens without a sufficient reason, in which even the smallest event fits a rational, providential order that a sufficiently penetrating mind could in principle discern. The year of his own professional exile, spent finishing a dynastic history for the family that left him behind, does not obviously look like part of that order. He wrote the Monadology anyway, still holding, or at least still arguing, that it was.

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.