page_title: List of multiple discoveries
section_title: 17th century
hierarchical_section_title: List of multiple discoveries / 17th century
context_page_description: Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. "Sometimes," writes Merton, "the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."
  Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall; the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
  Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to such famous historic instances. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.
context_section_description: Sunspots – Thomas Harriot (England, 1610), Johannes and David Fabricius (Frisia, 1611), Galileo Galilei (Italy, 1612), Christoph Scheiner (Germany, 1612).
  Logarithms – John Napier (Scotland, 1614) and Joost Bürgi (Switzerland, 1618).
  Analytic geometry – René Descartes, Pierre de Fermat.
  Problem of points solved by both Pierre de Fermat (France, 1654), Blaise Pascal (France, 1654), and Huygens (Holland, 1657).
  Determinants – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Seki Kōwa.
  Calculus – Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Pierre de Fermat and others.
  Boyle's law (sometimes referred to as the "Boyle-Mariotte law") is one of the gas laws and basis of derivation for the Ideal gas law, which describes the relationship between the product pressure and volume within a closed system as constant when temperature remains at a fixed measure. The law was named for chemist and physicist Robert Boyle who published the original law in 1662. The French physicist Edme Mariotte discovered the same law independently of Boyle in 1676.
  Newton–Raphson method – Joseph Raphson (1690), Isaac Newton (Newton's work was written in 1671, but not published until 1736).
  Brachistochrone problem solved by Johann Bernoulli, Jakob Bernoulli, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Guillaume de l'Hôpital, and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. The problem was posed in 1696 by Johann Bernoulli, and its solutions were published next year.
  Steam engine: Patent granted to Thomas Savery in 1698. The invention has often been credited to Thomas Newcomen (1712). Other early inventors have included Taqī al-Dīn (1551), Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1606), Giambattista della Porta, Giovanni Branca (1629), Cosimo de' Medici (1641), Evangelista Torricelli (1643), Otto Von Guericke (1672), Denis Papin (1679), and many others.
caption: Leibniz
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "4799", "Image ImageLength": "6372", "Image BitsPerSample": "[16, 16, 16]", "Image Compression": "LZW", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image ImageDescription": "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz\n*oil on canvas\n*81 x 66 cm", "Image Make": "Hasselblad", "Image Model": "Hasselblad H3D-39", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "173661/1000", "Image YResolution": "173661/1000", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2017:03:20 17:08:41", "Image Artist": "Bernhard Christoph Francke (? - 1729)", "Image Copyright": "Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig, \nMuseumsfoto:Claus Cordes", "Image ExifOffset": "500", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "966", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3530", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/90", "EXIF FNumber": "13", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:02:14 10:22:40", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:02:14 10:22:40", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "871321773/134217728", "EXIF ApertureValue": "993329223/134217728", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "4", "EXIF SubjectDistance": "937/500", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "120", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4486", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "5538", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "147059/100", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "147059/100", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "84"}