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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, if you look at the Newton's first papers of differential calculus, they are very hard to understand and he explains them very confusing way.

Whoever discovers these things must do so without concepts and formulations the people who came later made to simplify and understand them. The amount refinement that happens between invention and teaching the concepts to undergraduates is huge.

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In the case of differential calculus Leibniz (a German) came up with it at roughly the same time and his notation and approach is what actually stuck. In the case of Maxwell's equations it was Heaviside who came up with the vector formulation as four equations and it took Grassman, Cartan and Hodge to arrive at the modern two equation formulation in terms of differential forms.

Also, calculus was much messier on the theoretical side until Weierstrass, Riemann etc. "fixed" it.

Speaking of Leibniz, this paper on the relation between the logarithm and the chainette is interesting: https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/awards/college.m...

(via https://fermatslibrary.com/s/how-to-find-the-logarithm-of-an... )

Your link is missing the f from .pdf, https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/awards/college.m...

Thank you

One of the things that really struck me reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was the observation in it that you could almost always distinguish scientific fields from other by whether they taught students using the original works of those who made important discoveries or if they re-wrote them into easier to understand textbooks. If you can't separate the truth of what someone said from the way they said it you might be doing something useful but you don't have the tools to be making actual progress.

Try looking at his Chemistry notebooks though...

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