Inventors and heroes [LWN.net]

Inventors and heroes

Posted Mar 17, 2022 8:56 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Inventors and heroes by Wol
Parent article: Toward a better list iterator for the kernel

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

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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...))