And I have come to realize that when Newton won the PR war against Leibniz over the invention of calculus, it was not just credit that was at stake, it was a way of thinking about science. Newton was in a sense quintessentially practical: he invented tools, then showed how these could be used to compute practical results about the physical world. But Leibniz had a broader and more philosophical view, and saw calculus not just as a specific tool in itself, but as an example that should inspire efforts at other kinds of formalization and other kinds of universal tools.
