alt Hacker News> Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Leibniz did the same, in the same timeframe. I think this lends credence to the Ortega hypothesis. We see the people that connect the dots as great scientists. But the dots must be there in first place. The dots are the work of the miriad nameless scientists/scholars/scribes/artisans. Once the dots are in place, somebody always shows up to take the last hit and connect them. Sometimes multiple individuals at once.
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Well, Leibniz did a different thing, with a similar part.
What does not go against the hypothesis. Both of their works were heavily subsided by less known researchers that came before them. But it's not clear at all if somebody else would do what they did on each of their particular field. (Just like it's not clear the work they built upon was in any way "mediocre".)
It's very hard to judge science. Both in predictive and retrospective form.
Which raises the question of whether there are any results so surprising that it's unlikely that any other scientists would have stumbled onto them in a reasonable time frame.
> The dots are the work of the miriad nameless scientists/scholars/scribes/artisans
That is not plausible IMO. Nobody has capacity to read the works of a miriad of nameless scientists, not even Isaac Newton. Even less likely that Newton and Leibnitz were both familiar with the same works of minor scientists.
What is much more likely, is that well-known works of other great mathematicians prepared the foundation for both to reach similar results