Abstract
Newton remarked that the laws of nature are expressed by the differential equations that he devised. Individual, and at times very important, differential equations had been considered and solved even earlier, but Newton turned them into an independent and very powerful mathematical instrument.
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Notes
A. G. Khovanskii, The geometry of formulas, Soviet Scientific Reviews — C, Mathematical Physics Reviews, Vol. 4, Harwood, New York, 1984, pp. 67–90.
A. N. Parshin explained to me that Leibniz’s “characteristic” essentially coincides with the “Gödei numbering”, by means of which Godei proved the incompleteness of all sufficiendy rich theories, thus disproving the Leibniz-Hilbert programme of formalizing mathematics.
“A good legacy is better than the most beautiful problem of geometry”, wrote Leibniz to l’Hôpital, “since it plays the role of a general method and enables us to solve many problems”. (18) Reference to the idea of universality does not justify the cynicism of this joke of Leibniz: a similar blasphemous phrase would have been unthinkable in the mouth of Barrow and even Newton.
Only after the death of Hooke in 1703 did Newton agree to take on the position of President of the Royal Society. One of the first acts of Newton in this position was to destroy all the instruments of the late Hooke, and also his papers and portraits. So now the Royal Society had portraits of all its members except Hooke. Not one drawing of Hooke, who was a member, curator and secretary of the Royal Society, was preserved. In the folder of Hooke’s biography recently published in the Soviet Union (20) there is a portrait, but this portrait is not genuine, but made up by the methods of modern crime detection from verbal descriptions of Hooke.
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© 1990 Birkhäuser Verlag Basel
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Arnol’d, V.I. (1990). Mathematical Analysis. In: Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-9129-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-9129-5_3
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Online ISBN: 978-3-0348-9129-5
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