Today these two brilliant men are both credited with fathering calculus. However, this co-ownership was not harmoniously agreed upon. In fact, there were years of disputes of ill-tempered aristocratic mathematicians.

The problem arose out of the fact that Newton did not publish his discoveries immediately. It is accepted knowledge today that although both men made their discoveries separatly, Newton began his work on calculus before Leibniz. But, Leibniz published first and so for years was given full credit for the invention on calculus.

Newton and Leibniz appeared to remain out of the rift, but some believe that it was Newton that was in the back room stirring the pot of dissension. Leibniz was accused of plagiarism. And, although part of Newton's work was circulating to a select group of colleagues, whether Leibniz saw it or not is unknown. Of course neither of them conjured up their ideas alone. They were clearly influenced by those mathematicians before them as well as their contemporaries.

Newton delved deeper into the concepts of calculus than Leibniz did. But while Newton's methods were focused on limits and the physical realm, Leibniz concentrated on the more abstract and infinite. And, since both worked on them separately, the notation of Newtonian Calculus and Leibnizian Calculus is very different. Today the accepted notion is Leibniz'.

This debate of who did what first may seem like petty nitpicking to us today, but in fact this squabble had a huge impact on how mathematics developed, specifically in Britain. Being loyal to the Queen and full of national pride, the British mathematicians clung so tightly to Newtonian Calculus that when calculus began to be developed even more, they were left outdated with obsolete methods. England was so close-minded about other mathematicians discoveries that they didn't recognize any works by mathematicians from other counties until 1820.