Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along: Standing On The Shoulders of Gottfried!: G W Leibniz After 300 Years

Today November 14 2016 is 300th death anniversary of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a father of Calculus

Michael Brooks, ‘Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science’, 2011:

“...Newton is known for humbly declaring that he had achieved his great breakthroughs by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. Though this may be true in part, it is largely humbug. Newton was hardly humble, and it would be just as true to say that he achieved greatness by stamping on the shoulders of giants. When others, such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Liebniz, made breakthroughs in fields he was also researching, Newton fought ferociously to deny them credit for their work. Though his reputation has been polished for centuries – he is the ‘scientist’s scientist’ – Newton was not someone you would want to put in charge of science today; in later life he suffered episodes of madness and became obsessed with the Old Testament Book of Daniel, writing a commentary on it that he considered his greatest work. Hardly the model of scientific level-headedness...”

Matthew Stewart, ‘The courtier and the heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the modern world’, 2006:

"...The alarming fact about Leibniz is not that he did not always tell the truth, but that he was, in a certain sense, constitutionally—or perhaps metaphysically—incapable of telling the truth. In his handling of his first contact with Spinoza, to cite the most pressing example, what we observe is not straightforward duplicity, but a much more complex phenomenon that deserves the name “multiplicity”—that is, showing a variety of related but mutually incompatible faces, none of which seems to enjoy the privilege of being entirely “true” or entirely “false.” From Leibniz’s multidirectional correspondence on the subject of Spinoza, we may conclude neither that he was an anti-Spinozist intending to lure the sage of The Hague into a trap, nor that he was a crypto-Spinozist who concealed his true identity from his orthodox colleagues. Rather, he was—always to some degree, depending on the listener, the context, and the particular purposes in play—a subtle and indeterminate mixture of both. As Lewis White Beck has said, he was “all things to all men” but the price paid for such omnidexterity was that he was no one thing to everybody..."

Jason Socrates Bardi, ‘The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time’, 2006:

“...Leibniz and Newton both had a claim of ownership on calculus, and today they are generally regarded as twin independent inventors, both credited with giving mathematics its greatest push forward since the time of the Greeks.

While the glory of the invention may be great enough for today’s scholars to share, it was not enough for Leibniz and Newton, and by the end of the seventeenth century accusations of impropriety were being raised by the backers of both men. The first two decades of the eighteenth century would see the eruption of the calculus wars...”