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."

Comments

Re:I may not know much about physics,

[Maestro4k]

• but weren't Newton's ideas debunked by Einstein's theory of relativity? Shouldn't we be focusing on the physicists who got it right, not the ones who were wrong.

Don't know much indeed, apparently you should add Math to that as well.

While some of Newtons ideas were later proven to be incorrect by Einstein, most of his work on Calculus (which he pretty much invented) are still perfectly valid today. Most of Newton's calculus stuff that isn't used nowadays is simply because quicker/better methods have been developed since, not because he was wrong. As pretty much anyone who's taken Calculus can tell you, inventing it was quite a feat, it's not always easy to understand when you're learning it from someone who already knows it, developing it from scratch is quite amazing!