Comment by benbreen

If you go to Google Scholar and search "Tai's model," you can find that this from 1994:

"Tai's formula is the trapezoidal rule"

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224.short

As well as Tai's response: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1225.2.short

As a fellow academic, it seems to me like Tai wasn't really claiming to have reinvented the wheel here (or maybe I should say the area under the wheel). It looks to me like she took what my psychologist friends call the "Least Publishable Unit" (LPU) too much to heart. She claims, in the response, that she was asked to publish it by some colleagues so that they could cite her in a paper of their own; it's unclear to me why they would need to cite such a thing, but most likely it was just the typical explanation - where you cite your friends at any possible opportunity, even when they recapitulate Isaac Newton ;)

Granted, I think it's a weak rationale, but I suspect it's not so much that no one involved knew calculus; it's more that they wanted to drum up more citations for people inside their field rather than outside. In fact, I see that even the people who wrote in to protest managed to rack up 7 citations.