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[HM] Gerhardt & Leibniz papers
Posted:
Oct 14, 2000 9:19 AM
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In his account on Leibniz in A Short Account of the History of
Mathematics, W.W. Rouse Ball wrote the following:
".... but when, in 1849, C. J. Gerhardt examined Leibniz' papers he
found among them a manuscript copy, the existence of which dad been
previously unsuspected, in Leibniz handwriting, of extracts from
Newton's De Analysi .......... together with notes on their expression in
the differential notation."
In another paragraph he writes:
".... on more than one occasion he deliberately altered or added to
important letters ...... before publishing them, and what is worse, that
a material date in one of his manuscripts has been falsified. (1675
being altered to 1673) ....."
These extracts are found on pages 357 and 360 respectively in the Dover
reprint of 1960.
I do not think that these facts prove or disprove anything in the
Newton-Leibniz dispute. Yet I was rather surprised that R.S. Westfall
does not mention these points at all in his admirable work Never at
Rest. My question to the historia list members is:
Why did Westfall fail to mention these points?
Emmanuel Attard Cassar
emmcar@nextgen.net.mt
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