by James Gleick
Newton is not much less of a cypher to me after reading this than he was before, which is unfortunate, because what I really wanted was insight into his character. I'm left with the impression of a man with a big, fragile ego, much less a scientist in the modern sense than I expected because of his ...
Perhaps I'm predisposed, keeping figures like Einstein and Feynman in mind, to the idea that great minds are inherently liberal. Not in politics necessarily, but in personality. It's hard to imagine someone of the intellectual stature of the inventor of the calculus and modern mechanics not being ma...
This is one of those "torn between three stars and four" books. I did get a good sense of who Newton was. He was an asshole. Gleick gets pretty technical. A lot of this book describes Newton's theories, including calculus, in no small amount of detail. I've been frustrated in the past by biogra...
An excellent introduction to the life of Isaac Newton. Too short to go into depth on any time period of Newton's life, Gleick chooses to focus on Newton's personality and world view, which he rigorously developed over the course of his life, and how these gave rise to his great discoveries in physic...
Isaac Newton was a wizard?!* I love that there was a time, only just a few hundred years ago, in which men attempted wizardy-like experiments, working magic if you will, in their attempts to turn lead into gold and what have you. That's awesome. As a nice "getting to know you" leaping off point, Gle...
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