Around 1900 B.C., a student in the Sumerian city of Nippur, in what’s now Iraq, copied a multiplication table onto a clay tablet. Some 4,000 years later, that schoolwork survives, as do the student’s ...

The followers of Leibniz in Germany and those of Newton in England are neglecting their productive work in favor of serving as “cat’s-paws and hired leg-breakers,” as Root puts it, in arguments over ...