The crumbs off his plate are the entire careers of other people.

July 19, 2013 12:31 AM

Neil Degrasse Tyson waxes eloquent about Isaac Newton [chopped YouTube link, full length video 'SciCafe: Life the Universe and Everything' here]

Previously: NDT on the blue

...and if there's an Origins of Calculus battle, here's some fodder: in brief, in (a lot of) detail, and of course, in xkcd.

posted by mysticreferee (8 comments total)

I highly recommend the BBC documentary The Birth of Calculus. The narrator shows the original handwritten notebooks of Newton and Leibnitz, then uses computer graphics to explain the math concepts as they were developed to become calculus. I was surprised to learn that some of Newton's breakthroughs came while trying to solve cardioids.
posted by charlie don't surf at 4:54 AM on July 19, 2013 [6 favorites]

I had a lawyer for a first semester calculus instructor, who spoke excitedly (and by that, I mean with interest) about the Newton and Leibnitz deal, and often took time out of lectures to quote the Calculus Wars book noted in the second to last link. Thoroughly enjoyed the instructor's class: I think as a lawyer he enjoyed the intricate mechanics that make calculus work (and showed that as he slowly and carefully laid out concepts), and the details of Newton's and Leibnitz's separate calculus proposals.

Great post!!!
posted by JoeXIII007 at 5:52 AM on July 19, 2013

Calculus was invented in 1994...
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:16 AM on July 19, 2013

Calculus was invented in 1994...

Or maybe by Seki Kowa, a few years before Netwon and Leibnitz. Or maybe even before that, by other anonymous Japanese sangaku mathematicians.
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:49 PM on July 19, 2013

NDgT is just awesome. Thank you for this post.
posted by nostrada at 3:50 PM on July 19, 2013

This. from here.
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:23 PM on July 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

I never considered that Newton chose the colors of the rainbow (ROY G BIV) so that they came out to a mystical number of 7 colors. Nah, it was probably just for pronounce-ability.

Thanks for the post, always fun to listen to NDgT.
posted by finnegans at 6:40 AM on July 20, 2013

Speaking of NDgT, here's a 3 1/2 minute trailer for his upcoming 'remake' of "Cosmos".
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:57 PM on July 20, 2013