But the toll dropped during the winter, and stayed low, with only 2,000 more deaths from the disease tallied through all of 1666. Then, just as it appeared that the epidemic was truly done, came the four

Most important, this new quantitative approach to nature offered the gift of prophecy: calculate now, and you can find where the moon or Jupiter or whatever will be, days, years, centuries from now. Though

After his death, the original at Woolsthorpe was still known in the neighborhood as Sir Isaac’s tree. Every effort was made to preserve it as long as possible, until it finally collapsed in a windstorm

He wasn’t completely free of the older view as he pondered the tricks that schoolmasters used to construct the canonical curves without bothering with any algebra: a string attached to a peg that could

Some of the works Newton had already read used infinite series to attack a variety of questions—for one, chasing down ever more precise values for that bane of middle school geometers, π(the number used

The study of curves was a central fascination of seventeenth-century mathematics, and Newton had plunged into the field when he read a translation of René Descartes’s Geometrya year before the plague hit.

There, he recorded in his diary, he found “all the towne almost going out of towne, the coaches and waggons being all full of people going into the country.” He stopped awhile at the Cross Keys tavern—long

PART ONE COUNTING AND THINKING Natural Philosophy consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature, and reducing them, as far as may be, to general Rules or Laws,—establishing these rules by

Alternatively, as the skeptical Defoe warned, the clever men of Exchange Alley had figured out a way to get rich off of the public interest: they were “ready, as Occasion offers, and Profit presents, to

INTRODUCTION “the great Follies of Life” LONDON, 1719 The year had begun well enough for London’s stock traders, working from their corner of the city, a narrow passage called Exchange Alley. Buying and

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