War of Extermination

Abstract

Wallis’s Opera mathematica blatantly showed that even the great old man of English mathematics did not know anything about Newton’s mathematical achievements before 1676 – how then could Leibniz have known? Wallis’s nationalist pride carried him away in his Opera to clearly take Newton’s side. In the preface to volume I Wallis wrote that Newton had explained his method to Leibniz (‘methodum hanc Leibnitio exponit’), which was obviously false, but Wallis wrote under the control of Newton [Hall 1980, p. 129]. There were no longer witnesses of the development of Leibniz’s calculus between 1675 and 1684, nor were there witnesses of Newton’s developments between 1666 and 1685. John Collins would have had to say something, but he had been dead for 20 years in 1703. Now the events overturned.