I would normally wait until I had finished it, but I’m so enjoying James Gleick’s Isaac Newton that I had to encourage others who may have similar interests to buy it. I had read Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science when it came out in 1988 and enjoyed it, but his biography of Isaac Newton is much better. Even years earlier than that I had struggled through Newton’s Opticks: Or a Tratise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light and his Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy while at St. John’s College in Annapolis, but I never knew much at all about the life of the great man. Now I do. And I’m grateful to Mr. Gleick for making the learning of it so enjoyable.
Gleick is excellent. I’ve always had a fascination for chaos theory and dynamical systems –and how they might be applied to economic puzzles as well as to problems in the other sciences.
Have you read Genius, his book on Richard Feynman, as well?
Did you read Opticks and the Pricipia because St. John’s College focuses on the Great Books curriculum? (At least, I was under the impression that that’s what they did there…)
Anyway, I’ll take the recommendation. Thanks!
I didn’t read any of Gleick’s other books, just “Chaos” and “Isaac Newton.” But those two are quite good. (When “Chaos” came out I also attended some conferences on economics and the mathematics of chaos; I’m not sure that what I saw at the time was much of an advance in knowledge, but more a bit of excitement about being more mathematical in seemingly cool ways.)
And I did indeed read Newton’s books (not all of the Principia, by the way, but enough to make my head spin) at St. John’s as a part of the curriculum. That’s in the junior year; here’s a brief description of the junior year mathematics tutorial, which sounds as I recall it from, um, a long time ago:
http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/asp/main.aspx?page=6644&parent=1304#jun
I hope that you like the book as much as I do. (It’s also a great read on the exercise bike at the gym, by the way.)
A great interview with Gleick on this book:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydon/2003/08/23
Jay