Acta Eruditorum
periodical literature
Acta Eruditorum (from Latin: Acts of the Erudite) was the first scientific journal of the German-speaking lands of Europe, published from 1682 to 1782.
History
Acta Eruditorum was founded in 1682 in Leipzig by Otto Mencke, who became its first editor, with support from Gottfried Leibniz in Hanover, who contributed 13 articles over the journal's first four years. It was published by Johann Friedrich Gleditsch, with sponsorship from the Duke of Saxony, and was patterned after the French Journal des savants and the Italian Giornale de'letterati. The journal was published monthly, entirely in Latin, and contained excerpts from new writings, reviews, small essays and notes. Most of the articles were devoted to the natural sciences and mathematics, including contributions (apart from Leibniz) from, e.g., Jakob Bernoulli, Humphry Ditton, Leonhard Euler, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Jérôme Lalande, but also from humanists and philosophers such as Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, Stephan Bergler, Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff.
After Otto Mencke's death in 1707, Acta Eruditorum was directed by his son, Johann Burckhardt Mencke, who died in 1732. The journal had changed its name by then to Nova Acta Eruditorum. Beginning in 1756 it was led by Karl Andreas Bel.
Role in the Calculus War
Although Mencke once exchanged letters and publications with Isaac Newton, Newton was not a correspondent of Acta. The dispute between Newton and Leibniz over credit for the development of differential calculus started with a contribution by Leibniz to the May 1697 issue of Acta Eruditorum, in response to which Fatio de Duillier, feeling slighted by being omitted from Leibniz's list of the best mathematicians of Europe, announced that Newton had discovered calculus before Leibniz and the latter had probably even relied on Newton's achievements.
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This entry incorporates text from “Acta Eruditorum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.