[drieddust]

I will get down voted for saying it. But Newton most likely didn't invent Calculus. Circumstantial evidence suggest that Kerala School of mathematics passed the knowledge to the Jesuit missionaries who in turn might have passed it on to the Newton. Link to the research on this topic[0].

[0] https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/indians-predated-...

[gjm11]

I was going to say: "I'm torn, because usually I have a policy of downvoting every HN comment I see that says 'I'm going to get downvoted for this', but this looks really interesting".

But then I checked your link, and in fact it doesn't at all say that Newton's work on calculus wasn't original. The thing it claims Keralan mathematicians might have done first was infinite series. So I can downvote you for pre-emptive complaining about downvotes with a clear conscience :-).

But then I checked (so far as I easily could using Amazon's "look inside" feature) the book referenced there, and in fact it does mention that a guy called Bhaskaracharya had something like the notion of derivative a couple of centuries before Newton and Leibniz. (It looks to me as if what he had was a special case rather than the general concept, though; if I'm right about that, it's an important distinction.) So now I'm conflicted again.

[EDITED to add:] The book in question is called "The crest of the peacock: Non-European roots of mathematics".

Well, it seems to me that the most that can credibly be true here is that Newton's discovery of calculus was influenced by closely related prior work by the likes of Bhaskaracharya. I don't think this is enough grounds for saying that "Newton most likely didn't invent Calculus". So, downvote it is. (For complaining about getting downvoted, not for the hyperbole about Newton.)

[drieddust]

Thanks for investing so much energy. I regret to be the source of emotional conflict. :)

[droctothorpe]

What an emotional roller coaster!

[r00tanon]

In Newton's case, even if there were hints in existing literature available to him at the time of concepts like limit and derivative, which is arguable, he would still have had to connect all the dots and create a workable new mathematics largely on his own, which he did. What's also clear through the examples in his Principia, he was using his Calculus to solve problems no one had solved before.

So, no downvote here, but what's the point? Even if someone had previously invented the Calculus at some point in ancient history, they didn't do anything noteworthy with it, and/or, some catastrophe erased the evidence of their work. Does this in any way diminish Newton's invention?

[wrycoder]

I'll just let Newton and Leibniz argue it out. And I'll go re-read Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy.