Inventors and heroes [LWN.net]

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 14, 2022 0:13 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Inventors and heroes by Wol
Parent article: Toward a better list iterator for the kernel

> > 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.