Sir Isaac Newton had a Rival

Newton may be envious and vengeful of his intellectual adversaries. One of his rivals was a German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, with whom he had a heated rivalry about who developed calculus. Newton created a version of calculus in the 1660s, but he did not publish it at the time. Leibniz developed his own version of calculus in the 1670s and published it a decade later. After documents describing Newton's secret writings leaked through the Royal Society, Newton accused the German researcher of plagiarizing them. Leibniz claimed that he arrived at his conclusions on his own and accused Newton of plagiarizing from his published work.

In an attempt to defend himself, Leibniz approached the Royal Society, and in 1712, Newton, the organization's president since 1703, agreed to appoint an unbiased committee to investigate the matter. Instead, he crammed the committee with his admirers and even wrote the report, which publicly credited him with the discovery of calculus.

The majority of modern historians think that Newton and Leibniz independently created infinitesimal calculus. Today, however, Leibniz's calculus system is the most widely utilized.