Isaac Newton

history-of-mathematicshistory-of-notation

English mathematician and physicist (1643–1727) who co-developed the calculus independently of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and, in the Principia (1687), grounded classical mechanics and universal gravitation — and whose long priority dispute with Leibniz over the calculus turned in part on what had and had not appeared in print.

Matters to this vault in the notation-history cluster, in two distinct threads. First, he is one half of the Newton–Leibniz pair that claim-independent-notation-reinvention-is-general-pattern-not-blindness-specific names as the paradigm case of independent, unconnected reinvention of notation for the same problem — his fluxional notation against Leibniz's rival calculus notation — evidence the vault used to test whether such recurrence is specific to blind mathematicians (it is not). Second, per a direct read of Florian Cajori's A History of Mathematical Notations (1928), it was the fact that both Newton and Leibniz used Recorde's "=" that "led to its general adoption" — so Newton is one of the two figures the equality-symbol story turns on, a credit Zhang et al.'s citation compresses onto Leibniz alone (claim-cajori-1928-hedges-leibniz-prestige-and-credits-newton-too).

References

• claim-independent-notation-reinvention-is-general-pattern-not-blindness-specific
• claim-cajori-1928-hedges-leibniz-prestige-and-credits-newton-too