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294 points imurray | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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0xbadcafebee[dead post] ◴[] No.44066367[source]
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teruakohatu ◴[] No.44067087[source]
> High-strung, antisocial, egotistical, domineering, rage-filled.

I think you are doing the man a disservice summarising him in such a way.

His interest in unorthodox/heretical religion was at least since he was at university. He spent a significant amount of time on alchemy.

Newton was the President of the Royal Society for over two decades, an MP for a similar amount of time which I would think required a lot of interpersonal relationships and socialising.

He seemed to get along well with family who cared with and lived with him and described him as loving.

The traits of holding grudges and raging were probably as common in academia then as they are today (tech is benign in comparison), but are otherwise sociable and genuinely trying to be good, albeit flawed, people.

He made numerous statements of modesty, the most famous being "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This has, IMHO, been unfairly reinterpreted in recent times as being a insult to a rival rather than taken at face value.

If every comment, action, HN comment, tweet etc. of any person's entire life was interpreted in the least charitable light we would all be recorded in history as being as vile as you describe him.

I think at the end of the day he was just a gifted flawed human.

replies(2): >>44067438 #>>44077225 #
1. srean ◴[] No.44067438[source]
> I think at the end of the day he was just a gifted flawed human.

And what gifts !

Imagine anyone doing Principia at an age of 24 (the book was published much later, but he had the results by then).

He would have been notable even if he had borrowed an established discipline of calculus to elaborate it's Physical consequences. No he had to develop it himself first and double check the results by translating that into geometry, into power series to be sure they are correct.

Einstein and Newton are often spoken of in the same breath, but by sheer body of work it seems a no-contest to me. Einstein had the luxury of being able to borrow tensor calculus, by then well formed. Perhaps the person who comes closest to Newton would be Archimedes, considering the time that Archimedes was doing his thing.