Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy

The calculus controversy (often referred to with the German term Prioritätsstreit) is an argument between 17th-century mathematicians Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz (begun or fomented in part by their disciples and associates) over who had first invented calculus.

It is a question that had been the cause of a major intellectual controversy over who first discovered calculus, one that begins simmering in 1699 and breaks out in full force in 1711.Newton claims to have begun working on a form of the calculus (which he calls "the method of fluxions and fluents") in 1666, at the age of 23, but did not publish it except as a minor annotation in the back of one of his publications decades later.

(A relevant Newton manuscript of October 1666 is now published among his mathematical papers.)

Gottfried Leibniz had begaun working on his variant of the calculus in 1674, and in 1684 had published his first paper employing it.

L'Hopital had ublished a text on Leibniz's calculus in 1696 (in which he expressed recognition about Newton's Principia of 1687, that Newton's work was "nearly all about this calculus").

Meanwhile, Newton, though he had explained his (geometrical) form of calculus in Section I of Book I of the Principia of 1687, did not explain his eventual fluxional notation for the calculus in print until 1693 (in part) and 1704 (in full).

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