about calculus from letters he and Newton exchanged. Many,
including Newton, believed this to be the case. JOHANN
BERNOULLIjumped to Leibniz’s defense, making it a personal
mission to discredit Newton’s character, beginning with writing
a slanderous letter and then shortly thereafter claiming that he
actually never wrote it. Newton, known for his outrageous
temper, was in a position of power as president of the Royal
Society at the time of the accusation against Leibniz, and he
took advantage of this by appointing a committee that would
decide once and for all who really invented calculus. Based on
the committee’s unsurprising finding that it was Newton, he
anonymously wrote the society’s official decision, and followed
that up with an anonymous review of its decision that Newton
was the true inventor of calculus. The debate did not end there,
as scholars argued the case well after the deaths of both men.
Leibniz and Newton are now considered by most to have
created their ideas independently, and Leibniz is individually
credited with inventing differential calculus.Lovelace, Augusta Ada (Augusta Ada Byron, Ada Byron
Lovelace, Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace)
(1815–52) This British countess, daughter of the famous poet
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was educated by private tutors
and lived the privileged life of high society. She is most known
for her friendship and work with mathematician CHARLES
BABBAGE. Lovelace was a proponent of Babbage’s Analytical
Engine, and suggested how he might make the machine
calculate the BERNOULLI NUMBERS. For this idea, many credit
her for creating the first computer program.Lucas, François-Edouard-Anatole (1842–91) French mathematics
professor who is most widely known for creating the formula
for the FIBONACCI SEQUENCE, and for devising a companion
formula now known as the Lucas SEQUENCE, or Lucas
numbers, in which the first number is 1, the second 3, and the
following numbers behave the same as the Fibonacci sequence.
In 1876 he discovered the largest PRIME NUMBERthat has ever
been calculated without the use of a computer. Called a
Mersenne number, it is denoted as M 127 (2^127 – 1) and equals
170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727.
Lucas invented a famous mathematical puzzle called the TowerBIOGRAPHIES Lovelace – Lucas
BIOGRAPHIES Lovelace – Lucas