But that’s what people have felt in the past. One of my hopes is that this book will inspire people to go and look at the papers. So when he published his biography, it included much of the heresy and alchemy, despite the fact that Brewster was a good orthodox Protestant. But he was also one of these Victorians that had to tell the truth. He fought long and hard to resuscitate Newton’s reputation. One person was David Brewster, who wrote a biography of Newton during the Victorian Era. I was more interested in the papers and the characters that worked on them. The alchemical stuff is technical, the scientific stuff is technical, the religious stuff is technical. One of the first editors of the papers said an older man should take up the task, because he’d have less to lose than a younger man. And one of the messages of the book is that getting too involved in the papers can be hazardous to your health. It’s more about how others have made sense of all this work. WIRED: Did you read through all this work yourself?ĭry: The book isn’t really about the contents of the paper. And then roughly 3 million related to science and math. There are about 1 million words related to his work as Master of the Mint. Around half of the writing is religious, and there are about 1 million words on alchemical material, most of which is copies of other people’s stuff. There’s roughly 10 million words that Newton left. It was only in the 1960s that some of Newton’s papers were widely published.ĭry: A huge amount. And so for hundreds of years few people saw his work.
After his death, Newton’s heir, John Conduitt, the husband of his half-niece Catherine Barton, feared that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment would be revealed as an obsessive heretic. He held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He wrote a forensic analysis of the Bible in an effort to decode divine prophecies. But Newton also studied alchemy and religion. But there are also pages that reveal another side of Newton, a side his descendants tried to keep hidden from the public.Įven in his lifetime, Newton was hailed as an eminent scientist and mathematician of unparalleled genius. There are pages upon pages of scientific and mathematical brilliance.
His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books.
#Sir isaac newton discoveries series
All he needed to do was omit the denominators and reduce the powers of $latex x$ by 1 in the power series displayed above.When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers. Returning to the problem of the circular segment, Newton realized that the equation for the circle itself (not merely the area underneath it) could also be represented by a power series. Eventually he calculated the first 15 digits of pi. It was an important finding, but it turns out there are better ways to approximate pi by means of an infinite sum, as Newton himself soon discovered after this initial foray into these kinds of infinite sums, now called power series. This is the region under the unit circle, defined by $latex y=\sqrt$. He started with the problem of finding the area of a “circular segment” of adjustable width $latex x$. Wallis included a novel and inductive method of determining the value of pi, and Newton wanted to devise something similar.
It all began when young Newton read John Wallis’ Arithmetica Infinitorum, a seminal work of 17th-century math. His reasoning in the letter is so charming and accessible, it reminds me of the pattern-guessing games little kids like to play. He recounts how he made a major discovery equating areas under curves with infinite sums by a process of guessing and checking. In it, he tells a story from his student days, when he was just beginning to learn mathematics. But in one letter to his competitor Gottfried Leibniz, now known as the Epistola Posterior, Newton comes off as nostalgic and almost friendly. Isaac Newton was not known for his generosity of spirit, and his disdain for his rivals was legendary.
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