Gottfried Leibniz, other than being one of the coolest real dudes to appear in a Neal Stephenson book, is credited with being one of two dudes to invent (discover?) calculus. According to his own notes, he first found the area of the graph of a function in 1675. He was accused of plagiarism by Isaac Newton, who himself had just begun to apply calculus to physics.
Newton maintained that though Leibniz had published first, he himself had figured out calculus years earlier, and had shared his unpublished notes with other English scientists, therefore Leibniz must have somehow been informed of the details of his work. Leibniz spent the rest of his life defending himself from these accusations, and at his death pretty much all of Europe believed Newton's account of it.
Modern history credits he and Newton as having both independently arrived at the discovery of calculus, and I think we're all glad that we kept Leibniz's name for it and not Newton's "the science of fluxions."
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