Some meandering thoughts about nothing special

Today, I was reading a five-year old column by Keith Devlin, a Stanford mathematician, on MAA (Mathematical Association of America) online, about Edward Witten, I came across a paragraph that puzzled me.

...But mathematical invention is not like invention in music or literature. If Beethoven had not lived, we would never have heard the piece we call his Ninth Symphony. If Shakespeare had not lived, we'd never have seen Hamlet. But if, say, Newton had not lived, the world would have gotten calculus sooner or later, and it would have been exactly the same! Likewise, if Witten had not lived we'd have obtained his results eventually. (Although the wait would almost certainly have been much longer for Witten's work than it was for calculus.) devlin

Is it necessarily true that if Newton hadn't invented the calculus or if Einstein hadn't come up with all those groundbreaking ideas, other scientists from afteryears would have invented exactly the same mathematical formalisms or theories? Does that mean there are only one way of working all these physical and mathematical theories out? I doubt that.

posted by dipeshb @ 12:38 AM