Isaac Newton

Crediting Newton alone, or crediting him first, understates a genuinely contested history. The Royal Society's own 1712-1713 inquiry into the dispute, published as the Commercium Epistolicum, is not the impartial verdict it presented itself as: the committee never sought Leibniz's own account of events, and the report was substantially written by Newton himself, then serving as the Society's president. Leibniz responded with his own anonymous pamphlet, Charta Volans. Modern historiography treats the two men as independent co-discoverers of calculus who arrived at equivalent results by different routes within a few years of one another, Newton earlier but unpublished, Leibniz later but first into print and with the superior, permanently adopted notation; it does not treat the 1712-1713 committee's finding for Newton as a settled, unbiased scholarly conclusion.

Leibniz and his supporters maintained that Leibniz developed the differential calculus, including the operation this atlas calls the derivative, independently of Newton, arriving at his own notation in the 1670s without access to Newton's then-unpublished method of fluxions, and that he published first, in 1684, four years before Newton's 1687 Principia. The 1712 Commercium Epistolicum, commissioned and effectively adjudicated by the Royal Society under Newton's own presidency, found for Newton, but its impartiality has been questioned ever since. The modern scholarly consensus is that both men reached the derivative independently, so this edge's plain "associated with Newton" is accurate but incomplete on its own: it names one of two independent originators, not the sole one.

The same priority dispute that attaches to the derivative attaches to the integral: Leibniz introduced the integral sign and worked out integration as the inverse of differentiation independently of Newton, publishing his methods from 1684 onward, years before Newton's own fluxional calculus appeared in print. Historians today treat the two as independent co-discoverers of both halves of the fundamental theorem of calculus, so crediting this edge to Newton alone, without its Leibniz counterpart edge on this same entity, understates a genuinely shared origin.