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The Greatest And The Luckiest Of Mortals
sgant writes "So says the 18th-century French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange about Sir Isaac Newton. The New York Times has a piece on 'The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture' which is a new exhibit at the NY Public Library. It includes a number of Newton's manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library, including a first edition of his most famous work, "Principia," bearing the author's corrections and additions for the next printing, have never before been shown in the United States."
He did not "invent" or "discover" the thing by himself. It's like all research: people put brick after brick, and then someone puts the last one and says "here is a building", and gets all the credit. And many years later (30 for Albert, 300 for Isaac) some geeks put posters of the guy in their rooms and suddenly feel illuminated. :)
Newton himself said of his work that he was only "standing on the shoulders of giants" meaning that if he had discovered new knowledge, it was from the ideas put down by euclid, archimedes etc before him.
(This phrase is engraved round the edge of £2 coins in the UK, since Newton also invented milling the edges of coins to prevent people from clipping them.)
However, he was probably being too modest. It wasn't just calc: this guy basically went away at some point in his life and came up with:
His laws of motion, which explained pretty much every physical phenomenom then studied.
His theory of gravity, which relates the movement of celestial bodies back to the laws of motion.
and
The differential calculus, which provided the maths necessary to apply all this.
He also did work in optics and other fields, and invented the catflap.
If anyone surpasses him as a physicist, it must be Einstein.
If anyone surpasses him both as a physicist and a mathematician, it's news to me.
Respect is due.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I do agree that Newton discovered/invented a large part of our mathematics
No he didn't! Elementary calculus may be useful but it's only a teardrop in the ocean of mathematics. Compare to Gauss who contributed to nearly everything mathematics was studying in his time and most of which is still relevant, while Newton's formulations have long since been surpassed by more modern constructions.
And Latin. We now know Latin to be a dead language. What real scientist uses Latin?
And the English system of weights and measures. He didn't even use the Metric system, or bother to convert the values!
How the great learned history critics and scientists of the future will scoff at our inaccurate decimal system, our clunky wire-based infosystems, and our use of BASIC.
We use the tools we have. The best of us modify them to fit our own needs. Every once in a while, someone comes up with a mod that everyone agrees is really cool. On that measure, Isaac Newton is the greatest hacker of all time. OK, maybe Edison was greater, or the woman who invented the stick.
I picking on your fine post (a bit unfairly, to be sure) because if someone comes up with a mod, how does that make everything that went before it "incorrect"?
sigs, as if you care.
Incorrect might not be the right word, it was not mathematically rigorous. There were instances when he treated an infintesimal as a zero and discarded it, there were instances where he treated it as a non-zero and divided it. Math is rigorous. You need a set of rules that hold in all situations. [Emphasis added]
A set of rules that hold in all situations means that there are no paradoxes.
There is nothing non-rigorous about infintesimals which behave in some cases identically with zero when added to something and in other cases behave like non-zeros when dividing two of them. What is non-rigorous and non-defensible is the attempted distinction between zero and non-zero. Not everything mathematical is a number. In fact most mathematical things are not numbers. It all has to do with functions from spaces to spaces that preserve interesting properties.