Prakash @8teAPi
— reply from Nathan Helm-Burger — saved image
Prakash @8teAPi So if you used a 1685 corpus, trained an LLM on it, Leibniz would be the inventor of calculus. Newton published in 1687. You can tell how serious a person is on data provenance on whether they choose to call Newton the discoverer of calculus or Leibniz. It's ok to say Newton, but then you also have to agree on rules on data provenance (ie private notes are equal to formal publication) that would shift the center of intellectual inquiry to very obscure long dead hermits rather than the heroes of the pantheon. 11:38 PM · Aug 4, 2026 · 1,825 Views 4 replies, 19 likes, 2 bookmarks Relevant Nathan Helm-Bu... @nathan84686... · 1s As an obscure not-yet-dead hermit, I appreciate this take. fabian @fabianstelzer · 8h recommended read [link card] goodreads.com — The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza & the Fa...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Twitter thread about data provenance and the Newton/Leibniz calculus priority dispute as an analogy for LLM training data credit, including a reply from Nathan Helm-Burger himself and a book recommendation for 'The Courtier and the Heretic.'
twitterhistory of scienceleibniznewtondata provenancenathan's own post