Merry Newtonmas 2021

[mikemarotta]

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.

Godfrey Kneller's Portrait, 1689.

Few people except numismatists know him to have been the Warden and Master of the British Royal Mint for thirty years.  He had himself sworn as a justice of the peace so that he could pursue and prosecute counterfeiters.  For most people, Newton is famous for his Three Laws of Motion.  Beyond that, those with additional education know him for creating the Calculus to prove his theories of celestial and terrestrial mechanics. In addition, Newton invented the reflecting telescope as a result of his experiments with light.  And he also proved the general case for the Binomial Theorem (“Pascal's Triangle”). He served in Parliament, representing Cambridge, where he had been a professor of mathematics.  He served as president of the Royal Society.

Newton’s ideas are easy to explain today, especially using algebra and the Leibniz notation for calculus. The proofs in the Principia are—and could only have been—delivered via geometry. We do not know it so well today. Richard P. Feynman intended to develop and present his own proofs to a class as a treat to relieve the stress of up-coming semester final examinations. He could not do it. He did not know enough geometry.

"Conder" Tokens from Middlesex. Catalogued as Dalton & Hamer 1035A. (See Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775–1821 by George Selgin.)
 
It seems that three students at Tokyo University started Newtonmas in their dormitory sometime before 1890.  As the undergraduates developed into graduates and assistants, their professors were drawn into the celebration, and a more suitable assembly hall was found in the University Observatory.  By 1890, they called themselves the Newtonkai  (Newton Association; 皆 = kai = “all”) and moved to the Physical Laboratory. There, they played games symbolic of great mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers: Newton’s apple, Franklin’s kite, a naked doll for Archimedes … 

That story comes from “A New Sect of Hero-Worshippers” published in Nature, Vol. 46, No. 1193, p. 459, 8 September 1892. It available from the publisher for $18 if you are not a member, or it can be found online at Google Books.

Reminders of Newtonmas Past
https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2017/12/reminders-of-newtonmas-past.html

This year's greeting.
https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2021/12/merry-newtonmas-2021.html

 

Edited December 12, 2021 by mikemarotta