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:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed

[phantasma6]

not invented, discovered

also, Leibniz also independantly devised the system of calculus at the same time

Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed

[slacktide]

And of course, Archimedes pretty much a cat's whisker away from discovering the integral around 200 BC, as described in the nearly lost work "The Method"

Re:I may not know much about physics,

[RayAlmostAnonymous]

Newton didn't get it 'wrong' it is just that his theories are less accurate at extremes - Einstein's theories of relativity produce answers that are the same as Newton's theories of motion at 'non-relativistic' speeds (hence the term non-relativistic).

These speeds (or more properly velocities perhaps) are those anything less than a significant fraction of the speed of light (or very close to a massive object for gravitational calculations). So, you only need Newton's equations for almost all practical applications.

Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

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. :)

Good BBC programme yesterday on Newton

[Anonymous Coward]

"Plague is sweeping across England, and a young Isaac Newton retreats to the isolation of Lincolnshire. Sitting in the family garden he watches an apple fall, and unlocks the secrets of gravity - or does he? Adam explores the truth behind this famous moment in the history of science, and discovers that Newton wrote his own account over forty years after the supposed event."

Listen to it here (starts 1 min 50 secs in)

Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed

[weierstrass]

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.

The Indian Roots of Calculus

[kaalamaadan]

Certain aspects of calculus were developed two centuries prior to Newton in India by Madhava of Sangamagrama. This seems to be widely accepted now. A few links to Madhava and other Keralese mathematicians are also present here.

Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed

[cletus_bojangles]

For instance, both Newton and Leibinitz incorrectly used infintesimals in their definitions.

That was the old view. There were some problems with their use of infinitesimals, but those problems have been cleared up more recently. The modern version of calculus via infinitesimals is known as nonstandard analysis. The landmark work on the subject is Robinson's 1966 book "Non-standard analysis".

Moreover, that sort of hen-pecking at Newton and Leibniz is not really productive. No one cares more about precision and correctness in definitions than mathematicians, and yet mathematicians still assign credit to those two.

Have you read the Principia? I have only read portions, but Newton does some pretty amazing stuff in there, besides just the use of calculus and the derivation of the inverse square law for gravity. For example, he proves that there is no closed form for elliptic integrals of a certain kind.

Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed

[n3k5]

not invented, discovered
also, Leibniz also independantly devised the system of calculus at the same time

In 'META MATH! -- The Quest for Omega', Gregory Chaitin writes:

Newton was a great physicist, but he was definitely inferior to Leibniz both as a mathematician and as a philosopher. And Newton was a rotten human being---so much so that Djerassi and Pinner call their recent book Newton's Darkness.

Leibniz invented the calculus, published it, wrote letter after letter to continental mathematicians to explain it to them, initially received all the credit for this from his contemporaries, and then was astonished to learn that Newton, who had never published a word on the subject, claimed that Leibniz had stolen it all from him. Leibniz could hardly take Newton seriously!

But it was Newton who won, not Leibniz.

Newton bragged that he had destroyed Leibniz and rejoiced in Leibniz's death after Leibniz was abandoned by his royal patron, whom Leibniz had helped to become the king of England. It's extremely ironic that Newton's incomprehensible Principia---written in the style of Euclid's Elements---was only appreciated by continental mathematicians after they succeeded in translating it into that effective tool, the infinitesimal calculus that Leibniz had taught them!

Morally, what a contrast! Leibniz was such an elevated soul that he found good in all philosophies: Catholic, Protestant, Cabala, medieval scholastics, the ancients, the Chinese... It pains me to say that Newton enjoyed witnessing the executions of counterfeiters he pursued as Master of the Mint.

[The science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has recently published the first volume, Quicksilver, of a trilogy about Newton versus Leibniz, and comes out strongly on Leibniz's side. See also Isabelle Stengers, La Guerre des sciences aura-t-elle lieu?, a play about Newton vs. Leibniz, and the above mentioned book, consisting of two plays and a long essay, called Newton's Darkness.]