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College Notebook by Isaac Newton
- misiti3780 13y agoThis is one of the most interesting posts I have seen on HN in a while. kudos
- camus2 13y agoI agree, this is huge.
- purpleturtle 13y agoThese are the types of comments that will soon disappear thanks to the magic of Pending Comments™.
- tim333 13y agoPerhaps. Or maybe not. If I had enough Karma I'd endorse this stuff.
- hayksaakian 13y agoIn all seriousness, does this comment tree contribute to the discussion of the OP?
- nzp 13y agoWith all due respect to those comments, would it really be a loss? I really, really don't want this comment end up taken as a personal attack on those commenters, that's not the point or intent. Rather, the point is let's rationally, without emotions about our egos, question what is the point of those comments. There is none. If you like something, you upvote, and iff you have any new information to add, add it. It's bearable in a submission with a low number of comments such as this, but in large ones, there tends to be also a large amount of such redundant comments. There is simply no point in posting such comments---they don't get you any karma (I hope!), they don't add any information useful to anyone, and they make it harder to go through the whole comment set.
- jedicoffee 13y agoThis is great I'll be reading all day. Thank you.
- hawkharris 13y agoOn a technical note, kudos to Cambridge for developing this beautiful platform for interacting with documents -- and for doing it without Flash. On a personal note, everything I wrote during my college career suddenly seems a little less substantial...
- frik 13y agoThe page uses SeaDragon (Ajax edition) from Microsoft former "Live Labs". It's the same infinite zoom technology that powers also Photosynth and DeepZoom both from Microsoft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seadragon_Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seadragon_Software
- untilHellbanned 13y agoyes very nice use of fancybox http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/ http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/
- reeses 13y agoBut I bet you wrote more, more accurate, and more advanced calculus than he did, and you wrote it the way Leibniz intended. :)
- dubberx 13y agoAgreed. However, I really miss that I can not navigate with any keys, mouse only...
- Oculus 13y agoThis reminds me of a blog I read by Stephen Wolfram discussing his viewing of Leibniz's notes. http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/05/dropping-in-on-gottfried-leibniz/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/05/dropping-in-on-gottfr...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- factorizer 13y agoI like this Wolfram guy. Blogging about Leibniz and the first sentence is obiously about stuff "he made" that now makes the world a better place. Yeah yeah, Leibniz, Newton, Einstein and Wolfram. What a team!
- atmosx 13y agoI recently read a quote on "Quicksilver" (Stephenson's novel) about his imaginary character "Daniel Waterhouse": "Daniel was angry with God. God had implanted on him a passion for natural philosophy. He wanted to be one of the greats. But God brought him on earth the same era with individuals like Hooke, Leibniz and Newton. What where the chances?" At this point in the novel, only Daniel has a clear view on Newton's genius, Hooke was renowned and Leibniz was not into mathematics (he studied to lawyer first, then turned into mathematics according to the novel, but knowing Stephenson I think it's true).
- jayvanguard 13y agoHis interactions with Newton are what got me hooked on the book. Brilliantly done.
- tsenkov 13y agoNow, whoever finds an error in Newton's exercises would feel like a god. :)
- zxexz 13y agoThanks to Cambridge for making this available to the general public, under a CC 3.0 license! The images are crystal clear, and easy to read. Props to Newton, as well :)
- dredmorbius 13y agoConsidering the original works are well outside of copyright, applying CC 3.0 to the images themselves really isn't especially grandiose of them. Though I appreciate their not trying to assert control.
- leoc 13y agoIIRC getting unencumbered high-resolution images of, for example, famous paintings in public galleries is still far from assured, so (grading on the curve) it's not to be underestimated.
- theef 13y agolove this. slight nitpick, might be helpful for an intern or somebody to help clear up some of the {illeg} pieces that can't be read artificially. edit: switched browsers, hover over {illeg} is understandable.
- lambdaphage 13y agoI'm always surprised when reading the notes of scientists and mathematicians working in previous centuries to see just how steeped they were in synthetic geometry. This was taken to an extreme in the case of the Principia, but one can't read Gibbs or Maxwell either without realizing that they felt Euclid in their bones in a way that few people do today, with possible exceptions for mathematicians trained under the Soviet system.
- atmosx 13y agoWhy are the mathematicians trained under the Soviet regime an exception?
- lambdaphage 13y agoI don't know-- usually the answer to such questions about academic priorities is "because it was cheaper", but they just seemed to emphasize geometry much more at the K-12 level. It's a generalization, of course, but a pretty robust one. One of my professors came from Kazakhstan, and once casually remarked that a certain problem on a homework set was "impossible unless you were Russian", since the proof was easy if you knew a certain proposition from Euclid, but extremely tedious without it. EDIT: this interview with Izaac Wirzsup comparing the Soviet and US systems confirms my prejudice: Another extremely harmful feature of [the US] school mathematics programs is that only about half of our students take geometry, and for only one year, generally in a concentrated high school course. Students cannot be expected to master the material taught in this way. Moreover, they are not being taught solid geometry, and they rarely have a workable perception of three-dimensional space, which is so essential for studying science, technical drawing, or engineering. Soviet children study geometry extensively for ten years, including two years of solid geometry.
- quarterwave 13y agoReminds me of an incident (I forget where I read about it) where Dirac is giving a lecture in Europe, someone asks a question & Dirac has to start working it out on the board - and Ehrenfest turns around and yells: Kids, now we can see how he does these things!, or something like that.
- Dale1 13y agoSuper Magical and ever so geometric comment here <<
- 3rd3 13y agoI wished they would show notebooks like these early in school: "Look, this is the pinnacle of human thought and it's full of corrected mistakes, scribbles, attempts and mnemonics".
- chronolitus 13y agoI see no straightforward way to download the entire notebook, only one image at a time. It would be pleasant to be able to read the thing offline, it's frankly fascinating. Great post!
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoI was on page 31, the download was http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/download/image%252Fjpg/document-image31.jpg?path=/content/images/MS-ADD-04000-000-00031.jpg http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/download/image%252Fjpg/document-im... ... I think a simple curl or wget with a range from [0]1 to 340 should work? wget example.com/{1..30}.html gets docs 1.html, 2.html ... 30.html FWIW. You may not be authorised to do that of course.
- escherplex 13y agoInitially tried using WinHTTrack on the document folder but DL rate was only 25kB/s. So if mentally you resort to sublimated-OCD mode the whole notebook can be downloaded, one page at a time, then combined and cropped in Acrobat for offline reading in about 1/2 - 3/4 hour. Final size = 80MB (and a very nice .pdf it is to have in your archives!) Curious to see the use of Y^e and Y^t for the words 'the' and 'that' in the mid 1600s. Figured they would have reverted to the 'thorn' letter rather than the earlier French printer's substitute.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoIt is interesting - also his curly e and the use of pentangles, and such. Looking around briefly I found this http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html listing of manuscript books by date. In particular this, http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/14003562?n=5&imagesize=1200&jp2Res=.25&printThumbnails=no http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/14003562?n=5&imagesize=1..., from early 1600s uses the same y^e form. I tried to find Wren or Boyle's manuscripts but a 2 minute search didn't yield them.
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- pitchups 13y agoThis is truly fascinating - a peek into the earliest thinking of arguably one of the greatest scientific minds who ever lived. It never ceases to amaze me that Newton, almost single-handedly and working all by himself pretty much laid the foundations for much of science for the next several hundred years. And in all likelihood, it all started with the thoughts he formulated while writing in this little notebook!
- stiff 13y agoThis is simply completely untrue. Newton synthesized a lot of earlier results in physics and mathematics into a unified framework, and he deserves a lot of credit for that obviously, but nevertheless it was a synthesis and not something done "single-handedly and all by himself", in fact you are contradicting Newtons famous own words that he was "standing at the shoulders of giants". Isaac Barrow, Newtons teacher, had already discovered the rudiments of calculus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Barrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Barrow Hooke played a significant role in establishing the law of universal gravitation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gra... Newtons first law comes from Galileo's principle of inertia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Newton.27s_1st_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Newto... And so on and so forth, lookup Kepler, Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, Barrow, Descartes, Fermat and so on in the Wikipedia, or better read any serious scholarly history of physics about this period, this is only scratching the surface of people whose work Newton very directly built upon. There is no synthesis to be done without a period of establishing a great many of particular results.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoEasy to dismiss genius as 'obvious', don't err too far on that side! Newton was certainly the greatest Scientist in a couple of centuries, instrumental in advancing three areas of Science. Not single-handedly certainly but nothing we ever do works that way. Hooke, btw, was an enemy of Newton. Hooke would publish books of drivel about 'what if' physics worked by a certain equation; Newton derived why physics Must work a certain way. 'Hookes Law' of springs should be another of Newton's laws, but Hooke had actually written down that spring law with no proof and no motivation, but nevertheless published first. Newton argued (correctly) why springs worked that way. So a basic rule of physics has the name of someone who did no physics. Or so the story goes.
- donniezazen 13y agoI take extensive amounts of notes to keep myself awake and focused. I rarely go back and refer to them.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoPage 31, http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/31 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/31, has errors in just about every numeric value it seems. The page reads (from the manuscript image, interpreting the abbreviations) "[...] an arithmetic progression increasing from an unite by 1 composeth triangles by 2, composes squares by 3, composes pentangles by 4, hexangles &c. as 1.2.3.4.5.6. composes the triangles [...]". In the "Transcription (normalised)" this is "[...] an arithmet: progres: increasing from an unite by b=2 formula composeth triangles. by a=5/3, composes squares. by y=22/61, composes pentangles. by x=33/61, hexang: &c as 1 compose the triangles 2 &c likewise 3 compose 4 &c So 1.2.3.4.5.6. compose the quintangles [...]. It appears nearly all the 'MathML formulas' are wrong? There is also a textual transcription error "quintangles" which should read "triangles". This is the only page I looked at. The "Transcription (diplomatic)" appears to bear the same errors. If this page is typical I hate to think how the hard to read or complex mathematical pages have been rendered in transcription. Edit: I've just noticed that the erroneous MathML formulas are correct renderings of other expressions on the same page, this is probably a coding/markup error?
- CamDigLib 13y agoThank you for spotting this. The transcriptions for the Newton papers are supplied by a third party (The Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk) so we will pass this onto them. At a quick glance at a few pages it seems browsers are rendering various sections differently which may account for some errors. Thanks again, Cambridge Digital Library
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoFYI then I'm using FF 28.0 on Kubuntu 13.10. I see the same in Google Chrome browser version 33.0.1750.152 and in Opera 12.16.
- jayvanguard 13y agoI'm just glad to see he can't draw circles well either.
- fogleman 13y agoNice. I'm kind of surprised how readable his english is (i.e. it hasn't changed too much)