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On 2003-02-24 05:52, informant wrote:
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There must have been a heavy flamewar between Newton and Leibniz.
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Actually (and typically) I believe the flame war was more intense between British academics and continental academics -- even after Newton and Leibniz were both deceased. You know, those national pride things...
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Nope, they we're both alive and well when the flame war started. See the MacTutor biographies of
Newton and
Leibniz, and also Trinity college has some of
Ball's "A Short Account of the History of Mathematics" online, which contains a fairly detailed
account of this controversy.
Also interesting is the war between Descartes's "force of motion", what we would call momentum, and Leibniz's "living force", what we call kinetic energy. Newton and his camp believed in conservation of momentum while Leibniz believed in conservation of energy. I find this fued more interesting since neither had a rational reason for their belief.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Wiley on 2003-02-24 17:13 ]</font>