Isaac Newton (1642–1727), Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society. The Principia of 1687 gave the world a single mathematics for the fall of an apple and the orbit of the moon. He also left some three million words on theology, chronology and alchemy, most of it unpublished in his lifetime and some of it unpublishable: he was privately an anti-Trinitarian, in a college dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and took a royal dispensation rather than the holy orders his fellowship required.
Works (1)
- Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John — Newton spent more of his life on prophecy and chronology than on optics, and left this unpublished at his death; his nephew Benjamin Smith saw it through the press in 1733. It is not a work of enthusiasm but of scholarship in Newton’s own manner — the prophetic images treated as a language with fixed meanings, the text of Daniel dated from the compilers of the Old Testament canon, the seventy weeks computed, and the eleventh horn of the fourth beast identified with the Church of Rome. The second part does the same for the Apocalypse, and argues that it was written before the destruction of Jerusalem. (18 notes)