List of multiple discoveries

Historians and sociologists have remarked on 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.[1] "Sometimes 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."[2]

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;[3] the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to only a few historic instances involving giants of scientific research. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.[4]

Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton"—a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together.[5]

Merton's hypothesis is also discussed extensively in Harriet Zuckerman's Scientific Elite.[6]

Contents

List of multiple discoveries

Pre-13th century

13th century

14th century

16th century

17th century

18th century

19th century

20th century

21st century

Quotations

"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring."

Farkas Bolyai to his son János in urging him to claim the invention of non-Euclidean geometry without delay,
quoted in Li & Vitanyi, An introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, 1st ed., p. 83.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Robert K. Merton, "Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science," European Journal of Sociology, 4:237–82, 1963. Reprinted in Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1973, pp. 371–82. [1]
  2. ^ Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science, 1973.
  3. ^ A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
  4. ^ Robert K. Merton, "Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery: a Chapter in the Sociology of Science," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105: 470–86, 1961. Reprinted in Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 343–70.
  5. ^ Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, p. 307.
  6. ^ Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, Free Press, 1979.
  7. ^ Gauss, Carl Friedrich, "Nachlass: Theoria interpolationis methodo nova tractata", Werke, Band 3, Göttingen, Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1866, pp. 265–327.
  8. ^ Heideman, M. T., D. H. Johnson, and C. S. Burrus, "Gauss and the history of the fast Fourier transform," Archive for History of Exact Sciences, vol. 34, no. 3 (1985), pp. 265–277.
  9. ^ Halliday et al., Physics, vol. 2, 2002, p. 775.
  10. ^ "Aug. 18, 1868: Helium Discovered During Total Solar Eclipse", http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0818/
  11. ^ Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, p. 933.
  12. ^ N.E. Collinge, The Laws of Indo-European, pp. 149-52.
  13. ^ Barbara Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, New York, W.W. Norton, 2005, ISBN 0-393-05137-4, p. 166.
  14. ^ "Photochemical equivalence law". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/457732/photochemical-equivalence-law. Retrieved 2009-11-07. 
  15. ^ M.J. O'Dowd, E.E. Philipp, The History of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, London, Parthenon Publishing Group, 1994, p. 547.
  16. ^ See the "bibliographic notes" at the end of chapter 7 in Hopcroft & Ullman, Introduction to Automata, Languages, and Computation, Addison-Wesley, 1979.
  17. ^ Ralston, Anthony; Meek, Christopher, eds. (1976), Encyclopedia of Computer Science (second ed.), pp. 488–489, ISBN 0-88405-321-0 
  18. ^ Campbell-Kelly, Martin; Aspray, William (1996), Computer: A History of the Information Machine, New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 84, ISBN 0-465-02989-2 .
  19. ^ Jane Smiley, The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer, 2010.
  20. ^ See Chapter 1.6 in the first edition of Li & Vitanyi, An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, who cite Chaitin (1975): "this definition [of Kolmogorov complexity] was independently proposed about 1965 by A.N. Kolmogorov and me ... Both Kolmogorov and I were then unaware of related proposals made in 1960 by Ray Solomonoff."
  21. ^ See Garey & Johnson, Computers and intractability, p. 119.
    Cf. also the survey article by Trakhtenbrot (see "External Links").
    Levin emigrated to the U.S. in 1978.
  22. ^ D. J. Gross, F. Wilczek, Ultraviolet behavior of non-abeilan gauge theoreies, Phys. Rev. Letters 30 (1973) 1343-1346; H. D. Politzer, Reliable perturbative results for strong interactions, Phys. Rev. Letters 30 (1973) 1346-1349
  23. ^ See EATCS on the Gödel Prize 1995.

References

External links