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 | | Isaac Newton: Eighteenth-century Perspectives by A. Rupert Hall ISBN-10: 9780198503644 ISBN-10: 0-19-850364-4 ISBN-13: 9780198503644 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-850364-4 Hardcover 1999-02-18 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description For the first time, the early eighteenth century biographical notices of Sir Isaac Newton have been compiled into one convenient volume. Eminent Newtonian scholar Rupert Hall brings together the five biographies on Newton from this period and includes commentary on each translation. The centerpiece of the volume is a new translation of Paolo Frisi's 1778 biography, which was the first such work on Newton ever published. This comprehensive work also includes the biographies of Newton by Fontenelle (1727), Thomas Birch (1738), Charles Hutton (1795), and John Conduitt, as well as a bibliography of Newton's works. This book is a valuable addition to the works on Newton and will be of extreme interest to historians of science, Newtonian scholars, and general readers with an interest in the history of one of the world's greatest scientific geniuses. | ||
Reviews | ||
dusty tomes gathered here This reminds me of those centuries of commentaries on Shakespeare. How analysts often end up dissecting what another analyst a hundred years ago said on the original subject. The book can be of interest to those who have wondered how earlier ages saw Newton. The biographies by European historians are now probably long disused; relegated to the back shelves of libraries. So Hall performs a good service for us, by patiently digging up those tomes and summarising them succinctly. You can see also how the European views might have been influenced by the protracted controversies between followers of Newton and Leibniz, as to who discovered calculus first. Now, centuries later, those controversies have ended. And another merit of Hall's study is to dispassionately scrutinise those earlier historians, without being drawn into an ambience of nationalism that was sometimes an undercurrent of those works. | ||