Robin Faichney <robin@faichney.demon.co.uk> wrote
> According to one of the books I'm reading right now,
> Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus, independently.
> The book is called "Newton: The Last Sorcerer", which
> you might think significant. (By Michael White, highly
> recommended, though not yet mentioned on website.)
I know -- it is usually attrubuted to Newton, but in fact the notation that
is used today was first introducted by Leibniz -- Newtons notations,
apparently, was not nice. As to being the "last" sorcerer, I doubt it.
Creativity is still a process that is little understood, and I would
*claim* that anybody responsible for a serious act of creativity in science
or mathmatics could be termed a Sorcerer -- I'm always amazed at the
creativity that some of the people in history must have possesed to come up
with some of the proof's I have seen -- you know, those proof's where you
just look and them and say "how the fuck did anyone EVER stumble across
THAT trick?" That, and the fact that somebody can *invent* a notation for
a type of thing nobody has ever done before -- this continually amazes me.
Such creativity is probably the best argument I can think of for proving
that humans have freewill.
ERiC