About five years ago, Michael Guillen of Harvard wrote a book entitled Five
Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.*
He pointed out that Gottfried Milhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician
who independently invented calculus (besides Isaac Newton), published the
first article on that discovery in 1684. Guillen writes, “The article did not elicit
immediate response because very few people in the world could comprehend it.
The author [Leibniz], with characteristic arrogance, had not tried very hard to
explain his discovery [calculus], presumably because he wanted to remind people
of how much smarter he was than they.” An attitude like that is inappropriate
for our book series