Advances in Historical Studies 2014. Vol.3, No.1, 22-32 Published Online February 2014 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ahs) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ahs.2014.31004 A Tentative Interpretation of the Epistemological Significance of the Encrypted Message Sent by Newton to Leibniz in October 1676 Jean G. Dhombres Centre Alexandre Koyré-Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France Email:
[email protected] Received October 8th, 2013; revised November 9th, 2013; accepted November 16th, 2013 Copyright © 2014 Jean G. Dhombres. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In accordance of the Creative Commons Attribution License all Copyrights © 2014 are reserved for SCIRP and the owner of the intellectual property Jean G. Dhombres. All Copyright © 2014 are guarded by law and by SCIRP as a guardian. In Principia mathematica philosophiæ naturalis (1687), with regard to binomial formula and so general Calculus, Newton claimed that Leibniz proposed a similar procedure. As usual within Newtonian style, no explanation was provided on that, and nowadays it could only be decoded by Newton himself. In fact to the point, not even he gave up any mention of Leibniz in 1726 on the occasion of the third edition of the Principia. In this research, I analyse this controversy comparing the encrypted passages, and I will show that at least two ideas were proposed: vice versa and the algebraic handing of series. Keywords: Leibniz; Newton; Calculus Principia; Binomial Series; Controversy; Vice Versa Introduction tober 1676 to Leibniz.