Inventors and heroes [LWN.net]

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 13, 2022 20:13 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Toward a better list iterator for the kernel by Wol
Parent article: Toward a better list iterator for the kernel

> I think the same is true of the Wright Brothers (the first successful aircraft was built in 1896 in England - it just didn't actually fly til about 10 years later ... :-)

If you're French you know that the "first" flight was performed by either Clément Ader or Louis Blériot, if you're Brazilian then you know that it was Alberto Santos-Dumont, if you're German then maybe it's Gustav Weißkopf / Whitehead? Etc.

Everyone is correct as long as you tweak the definition of "first flight".

> These things are probably obvious to any competent mind that decides it wants to tackle the problem.

I wouldn't say "obvious" but Isaac Newton (one of the very few who was _really_ way ahead of his time) put it best: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." This sentence was apparently inspired by older, similar sentences in an interesting, "recursive" twist.

Humanity is a very social species who can't achieve anything alone yet we love celebrating heroes. Inventors' contribution to progress is nothing compared to the Excel spreadsheets of the Department of Education but heroes make much better stories and movies and are a little bit more... inspirational! Heroes are especially important in American culture where the gaps are the widest; dispensing hope is so much cheaper. Panem, circenses and... "spes"?

> but he just happened to beat his competitor to the patent office.

Exactly: whatever you do, make sure you get some lawyers and businessmen on your side. History shows you can't make a difference without their help.

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Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 13, 2022 20:32 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

> I wouldn't say "obvious" but Isaac Newton (one of the very few who was _really_ way ahead of his time) put it best: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." This sentence was apparently inspired by older, similar sentences in an interesting, "recursive" twist.

Was he? I think he was probably one of the founding members of the Royal Society, and many of them were equally "ahead of their time" - or was it we just have no real record of their predecessors? (Because before the Royal Society there *were* no records? Just like Shakespeare is "the greatest English playwright", not because he was necessarily any good, but also because he was the *first* major English playwright, writing at the time "modern English" was born.)

And while Newton wrote "In Principia Mathematica", I think it was primarily written to beat his contemporaries into the history books. Certainly it's disputed whether he was the "inventor" of Calculus, and the same is probably true of most of his other advances.

From what I can make out, the rivalry was intense, and Newton just won the publicity war.

Cheers,
Wol

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 13, 2022 22:16 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

The current consensus is that Newton and Leibniz invented calculus at more or less the same time, independently of each other, but (in the English-speaking world at least) Newton had better publicity.

Interestingly, they also had very different ideas of what calculus was good for. Newton wanted to use it to model the physical world, while Leibniz seemed to think it had more metaphysical/philosophical significance. Arguably, they were both right, because the notion of Taylor series and analytic continuation have greatly improved our intuition and understanding of What Functions Are... and that has in turn been used to bring complex analysis into the world of physics and engineering (e.g. in the form of modern Fourier analysis). It's all connected in the end.

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 14, 2022 15:53 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Being French, I will argue that Fermat invented calculus before them!
Really, ideas only exist when they are shared, and for that you need to be at least two.

While Hilbert gave his theorems numbers (90, 92 are the most well known)
Poincarré gave them the names of people whose work inspired him.

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 13, 2022 22:33 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Shakespeare wasn't just first, he actually was incredibly good.

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 14, 2022 0:13 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> > Isaac Newton (one of the very few who was _really_ way ahead of his time)

> Certainly it's disputed whether he was the "inventor" of Calculus, and the same is probably true of most of his other advances.

OK, but:

> > heroes make much better stories and movies

So here it is: https://youtu.be/gMlf1ELvRzc "Then Newton came along and changed the game"

;-)

There is a genuine mathematician in awe of Newton in this video, so I think he was pretty far ahead. I have no idea whether he was ahead _alone_.

> or was it we just have no real record of their predecessors? (Because before the Royal Society there *were* no records?)

I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure we have plenty of scientific records much, much older than Newton. Newton lived more than 200 years after Gutenberg so I really doubt that was still a problem at a time.

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 17, 2022 8:56 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

The "shoulders of giants" quote was also meant as a slight to Leibnitz who was not tall.

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 17, 2022 13:05 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

That was Hooke, not Leibniz. (Newton seems to have been rather antagonistic and had several bitter rivalries. And as Master of the Mint he also had dozens of counterfeiters prosecuted and hanged, so those people probably weren't too happy with him either. But (to bring this marginally back on-topic) as Linus Torvalds said when asked about his heroes, "even though [Newton] was apparently not a very nice person, he was certainly one of those people who changed the world in many different ways" (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text...))

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 20, 2022 10:24 UTC (Sun) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

> I wouldn't say "obvious" but Isaac Newton (one of the very few who was _really_ way ahead of his time) put it best: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

The way I understand it, it was a dig at his arch-rival (in the 1670s), Hooke, who was short (and may have had a twisted back).