Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World - Hardcover

Berlinski, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684843927 ISBN 13: 9780684843926

Publisher: Free Press, 2000

Synopsis

The author of A Tour of the Calculus serves up a loving portrait of the life of Sir Isaac Newton that also assesses his remarkable accomplishments in the field of science, his rescue of the British mint and its currency, and his intellectual battles with colleagues. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

David Berlinski is an essayist, novelist, philosopher, and mathematician. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton and has spent many years in various academic positions across America and abroad. He is the author of A Tour of the Calculus and The Advent of the Algorithm. He lives in Paris.

Reviews

Isaac Newton (1642-1721) invented or coinvented calculus, discovered gravity and organized physics around mathematical laws. These and other findings in math and optics established him as the great mind of his age. Retiring, introspective and sometimes difficult, he also devoted much of his time to fine points of Christian theology. Known for hit books about math, Berlinski (A Tour of the Calculus; The Advent of the Algorithm) devotes this compact, engaging and readable volume to Newton's life, mind and accomplishments. Mixing snapshots of Sir Isaac's life and times with explanations of what the great man discovered, Berlinski hopes to produce not a detailed biographical record but "a sense of the man" and of how his mind worked. Berlinski's prose adapts with equal ease to historical background and to mathematical explanations: he's sometimes glib, but often a pleasure to read. (The text includes only the barest, most necessary graphs and equations: an appendix goes into greater detail.) The volume draws clean connections between Newton's works and his life, and links both to big questions dear to Berlinski: Did Newton inaugurate two centuries of attempts to explain all of life through math and physics? If he did, how? Are those attempts ending now? And how, exactly, does math relate to physicsAor to anything else in the world? Some readers will engage with Berlinski as he explores these philosophical tangents; others will simply enjoy his explication of Newton, whom Berlinski very plausibly labels "the last great natural philosopher whose vision about the world can be expressed in an intuitive way"Anot to mention "the largest figure in the history of western thought." (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Berlinski's skill in successful popularization of matters mathematical (recently in The Advent of the Algorithm, BKL F 15 00) proceeds apace with Sir Isaac. When the reclusive young Newton started thinking about the incompleteness of Kepler's and Galileo's explanations of planetary motion, he found that math itself was inadequate to his leaps of imagination, such as "extending gravity to the orb of the moon," as Berlinski quotes the mature Newton's reflection on his annus mirabilis of 1665-66. So he invented those concepts about rates of change in speed and acceleration that test-cramming high-school seniors tremble before: infinite series, derivatives of functions, the limit, and the calculus. Berlinski explains these with his customary inventiveness, then changes direction as Newton's interests did; that is, toward obsessions with alchemy and theology that bizarrely contrast with Newton's revolutionary theories of gravity and motion, which burst upon the world in 1687 in his Principia. Showing succinctly what F = MA and the other principles in Principia signify, Berlinski's engaging tour highlights both Newton the genius and Newton the flawed, imperfect man. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Berlinski, the author of several other works of science popularization (e.g., The Advent of the Algorithm, LJ 3/1/00), here presents a concise review of the development of Sir Isaac Newton's classical mechanics. He also provides selected brief biographical sections that highlight Newton's somewhat enigmatic personality and his work methods. The discussion of Newton's achievements in mathematical physics necessarily makes some use of diagrams and mathematical equations, but these are kept at a level that should be accessible to lay readers. An appendix gives further details but is still reasonably elementary. In several concluding pages, Berlinski reflects upon the meaning of Newton's work from today's perspective and ponders its implications for the future of physics. His writing style is, in turn, profound, dramatic, quirky, and entertaining. Occasionally, he almost strains too hard to make his work reader-friendly, but in general this is a very effective popular science book. Strongly recommended for both public and academic libraries.DJack W. Weigel, Ann Arbor, MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684843927
• ISBN 13: 9780684843926
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240