Today when asking the question ``Who invented Calculus?" one will receive the answer ``Newton and Leibniz both did independent of each other". But back during the time it all happened, this was not the case.
Interestingly, in 1676 Newton and Leibniz began corresponding, and continued to do so until about 1704 when controversy grew to it's peak. During this time both mathematician seemed to believe that the other did if fact discover their calculus independently, but after this they both began to accuse each other of plagiarism.
What is known is that Newton wrote his papers first in about 1665 to 1666. This was before Leibniz began his intense study of mathematics so there is no way that Newton could have read and plagiarized from Leibniz. So did Leibniz plagiarize Newton? At the time Leibniz was harshly accused of this.
There was four main pieces of evidence that were used against him. The first being that in 1673, Leibniz visited London and can in aquatinted with Henry Oldenburg and John Collins, two men the Newton spoke with about his work. Leibniz kept in contact with them and learned much about British mathematics. But it was later determined that Leibniz…show more content… Especially since Newton at first believed that Leibniz had come up with his calculus all on his own, it seems strange that this all happened. The first real attack was not made Newton or Leibniz but by the English mathematician, John Wallis. In a few of Wallis' publications, he included writing about Newton's calculus and made it sound as though he learned about the calculus from letters he received from Newton in 1676. These same letters were sent to Leibniz. This made it appear as though Leibniz read about Newton's calculus before writing his own, but if one were to read these letters, one would see that they did not have any information about calculus. It is said that Wallis made this hints because he tended to favor the work done by Englishmen over anyone
