List of multiple discoveries

Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery".

Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other.

"[2] Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz;[3][4] the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.

[7] A distinction is drawn between a discovery and an invention, as discussed for example by Bolesław Prus.