[cma]

He didn't specify general vs. special but there were lots of developments leading to special relativity too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativit...

[adrian_b]

Those developments had no relationship whatsoever with the Ricci calculus that had been published a few years before, which was my point.

When the General Relativity was developed in 1917, the Ricci calculus was no longer recent, but it was 17 years old.

Therefore what the OP supposed, that there was an immediate causal relationship between these lines of work, is not true.

[cma]

I wasn't saying Ricci calculus was related to special relativity discovery. OP didn't say whether talking about special or general relativity.

17 years old I think is quite recent given the gap between special and general (would you say no immediate connection between them because of the length of that gap?), and there were presumably other pieces involved.