NEWTON, ISAAC (b. Woolsthorpe, England, 25 December 1642; d. London, England, 20 March 1727), mathematics, dynamics, celestial mechanics, astronomy, optics, natural philosophy.

    Gregory was appointed (at a fee of £250) as general supervisor of the conversion of the Scottish coinage to British.

Newton ruled over the Royal Society with an iron hand. When Whiston was proposed as a fellow in 1720, Newton said that if Whiston were chosen, he “would not be president.” At Newton's urging, the council brought the society from the verge of bankruptcy to solvency by obtaining regular contributions from fellows. When a dispute arose between Woodward and Sloane, Newton had Woodward ejected from the council. Of Newton's chairmanship of meetings, Stukeley reported, “Everything was transacted with great attention and solemnity and dignity,” for “his presence created a natural awe in the assembly”; there was never a sign of “levity or indecorum.” As England's foremost scientist, president of the Royal Society, and civil servant, Newton appeared before Parliament in Spring 1714, to give advice about a prize for a method of finding longitude.

When Newton moved from Cambridge to London in the 1690's to take up the wardenship of the mint, he continued to work on the motion of the moon. He became impatient for Flamsteed's latest observations and they soon had a falling-out, no doubt aggravated by the strong enmity which had grown up between Halley and Flamsteed. Newton fanned the flames by the growing arrogance of his letters: “I want not your calculations but your observations only.” And when in 1699 Flamsteed let it be known that Newton was working to perfect lunar theory, Newton sent Flamsteed a letter insisting that on this occasion he not “be brought upon the stage,” since “I do not love to be printed upon every occasion much less to be dunned & teezed by foreigners about Mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the King's business.” Newton and Halley published Flamsteed's observations in an unauthorized printing in 1712, probably in the conviction that his work had been supported by the government and was therefore public property. Flamsteed had the bitter joy of burning most of the spurious edition; and he then started printing his own Historia coelestis Brittanica.

A more intense quarrel arose with Leibniz. This took two forms: a disagreement over philosophy or theology in relation to science (carried out through Samuel Clarke as intermediary), and an attempt on Newton's part to prove that Leibniz had no claim to originality in the calculus. The initial charge of plagiarism against Leibniz came from Fatio de Duillier, but before long Keill and other Newtonians were involved and Leibniz began to rally his own supporters. Newton held that not only had Leibniz stolen the calculus from him, but that he had also composed three tracts for publication in the Acta eruditorum claiming some of the main truths of the Principia as independent discoveries, with the sole original addition of some mistakes. Today it appears that Newton was wrong; no doubt Leibniz had (as he said) seen the “epitome” or lengthy review of the Principia in the Acta eruditorum of June 1688, and not the book, when (to use his own words) “Newton's work stimulated me” to write out some earlier thoughts on “the causes of the motions of the heavenly bodies” as well as on the “resistance of a medium” and motion in a medium.184 Newton stated, however, that even if Leibniz “had not seen the book itself, he ought nevertheless to have seen it before he published his own thoughts concerning these matters.”185

That Newton should have connived at declaring Leibniz a plagiarist gives witness to his intense possessiveness concerning his discoveries or inventions; hence his consequent feeling of violation or robbery when Leibniz seemed to be publishing them. Newton was also aware that Leibniz must have seen one or more of his manuscript tracts then in circulation; and Leibniz had actually done so on one of his visits, when, however, he copied out some material on series expansions, not on fluxions.186

No one today seriously questions Leibniz' originality and true mathematical genius, nor his independence—to the degree that any two creative mathematicians living in the same world of mathematical thought can be independent—in the formulation of the calculus. Moreover, the algorithm in general use nowadays is the Leibnizian rather than the Newtonian. But by any normal standards, the behavior of both men was astonishing. When Leibniz appealed to the Royal Society for a fair hearing, Newton appointed a committee of good Newtonians. It has only recently become known that Newton himself wrote the committee's report, the famous Commercium epistolicum,187 which he presented as if it were a set of impartial findings in his own favor.

Newton was not, however, content to stop there; following publication of the report there appeared an anonymous review, or summary, of it in the Philosophical Transactions. This, too, was Newton's work. When the Commercium epistolicum was reprinted, this review was included, in Latin translation, as a kind of introduction, together with an anonymous new preface “To the Reader,” which was also written by Newton. This episode must be an incomparable display of thoroughness in destroying an enemy, and Whiston reported that he had heard directly that Newton had “once