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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography is divided into four major sections. The last, by A. P. Youschkevitch, is concerned with Soviet studies on Newton and is independent of the text.

ORIGINAL WORKS

(numbered I-IV): Newton's major writings, together with collected works and editions, bibliographies, manuscript collections, and catalogues.

SECONDARY LITERATURE

(numbered V-VI): including general works and specific writings about Newton and his life.

SOURCES

(numbered 1-11): the chief works used in the preparation of this biography; the subdivisions of this section are correlated to the subdivisions of the biography itself.

SOVIET LITERATURE: a special section devoted to Newtonian scholarship in the Soviet Union.

The first three sections of the bibliography contain a number of cross-references; a parenthetical number refers the reader to the section of the bibliography in which a complete citation may be found.

ORIGINAL WORKS

I. MAJOR WORKS. Newton's first publications were on optics and appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1672-1676); repr. in facs., with intro. by T. S. Kuhn, in I. B. Cohen, ed., Isaac Newton's Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1958; 2nd ed., in press). His Opticks (London, 1704; enl. versions in Latin [London, 1706], and in English [London, 1717 or 1718]) contained two supps.: his Enumeratio linearum tertii ordinis and Tractatus de quadratura curvarum, his first published works in pure mathematics. The 1704 ed. has been repr. in facs. (Brussels, 1966) and (optical part only) in type (London, 1931); also repr. with an analytical table of contents prepared by D. H. D. Roller (New York, 1952). French trans. are by P. Coste (Amsterdam, 1720; rev. ed. 1722; facs. repr., with intro. by M. Solovine, Paris, 1955); a German ed. is W. Abendroth, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1898); and a Rumanian trans. is Victor Marian (Bucharest, 1970). A new ed. is currently being prepared by Henry Guerlac.

The Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London, 1687; rev. eds., Cambridge, 1713 [repr. Amsterdam, 1714, 1723], and London, 1726) is available in an ed. with variant readings (based on the three printed eds., the MS for the 1st ed. and Newton's annotations in his own copies of the 1st and 2nd eds.) prepared by A. Koyré, I. B. Cohen, and Anne Whitman: Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, the Third Edition (1726) With Variant Readings, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.-Cambridge, England, 1972). Translations and excerpts have appeared in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Rumanian, Russian, and Swedish, and are listed in app. VIII, vol. II, of the Koyré, Cohen, and Whitman ed., together with an account of reprs. of the whole treatise. The 1st ed. has been printed twice in facs. (London, 1954[?]; Brussels, 1965).

William Jones published Newton's De analysi in his ed. of Analysis per quantitatum series, fluxiones, ac differentias . . . (London, 1711), repr. in the Royal Society's Commercium epistolicum D. Johannis Collins, et aliorum de analysi promota . . . (London, 1712-1713; enl. version, 1722; “variorum” ed. by J.-B. Biot and F. Lefort, Paris, 1856), and as an appendix to the 1723 Amsterdam printing of the Principia. Newton's Arithmetica universalis was published from the MS of Newton's lectures by W. Whiston (Cambridge, 1707); an amended ed. followed, supervised by Newton himself (London, 1722). For bibliographical notes on these and some other mathematical writings (and indications of other eds. and translations), see the introductions by D. T. Whiteside to the facs. repr. of The Mathematical Works of Isaac Newton, 2 vols. (New York-London, 1964-1967). Newton's Arithmetica universalis was translated into Russian with notes and commentaries by A. P. Youschkevitch (Moscow, 1948); English eds. were published in London in 1720, 1728, and 1769.

After Newton's death the early version of what became bk. III of the Principia was published in English as A Treatise of the System of the World (London, 1728; rev. London, 1731, facs. repr., with intro. by I. B. Cohen, London, 1969) and in Latin as De mundi systemate liber (London, 1728). An Italian trans. is by Marcella Renzoni (Turin, 1959; 1969). The first part of the Lectiones opticae was translated and published as Optical Lectures (London, 1728) before the full Latin ed. was printed (1729); both are imperfect and incomplete. The only modern ed. is in Russian, Lektsii po optike (Leningrad, 1946), with commentary by S. I. Vavilov.

For Newton's nonscientific works (theology, biblical studies, chronology), and for other scientific writings, see the various sections below.

II. COLLECTED WORKS OR EDITIONS. The only attempt ever made to produce a general ed. of Newton was S. Horsley, Isaaci Newtoni opera quae exstant omnia, 5 vols. (London, 1779-1785; photo repr. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1964), which barely takes account of Newton's available MS writings but has the virtue of including (vol. I) the published mathematical tracts; (vols. II-III) the Principia and De mundi systemate, Theoria lunae, and Lectiones opticae; (vol. IV) letters from the Philosophical Transactions on light and color, the letter to Boyle on the ether, De problematis Bernoullianis, the letters to Bentley, and the Commercium epistolicum; (vol. V) the Chronology, the Prophecies, and the Corruptions of Scripture. An earlier and more modest collection was the 3-vol. Opuscula mathematica, philosophica, et philologica, Giovanni Francesco Salvemini (known as Johann Castillon), ed. (Lausanne-Geneva, 1744); it contains only works then in print.

A major collection of letters and documents, edited in the most exemplary manner, is Edleston (1); Rigaud's Essay (5) is also valuable. S. P. Rigaud's Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century . . . in the collection of . . . the Earl of Macclesfield, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1841; rev., with table of contents and index, 1862) is of special importance because the Macclesfield collection is not at present open to scholars.