Author Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker writes that the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery, called "multiples" by science historians, is very common (added quote characters for clarity):
One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the ...
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Google Blogoscoped>>Publish Date: 5/8/2008 7:10:05 AM
>>Keywords: discovered both
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