Is. Newton is an illustration made for Ranjan Roy’s “Sources in the Development of Mathematics” published by Cambridge University Press.
All handwriting is Newton’s own, scanned from his original texts specifically for use on this cover. About the handwriting, Professor Roy says: “Newton’s problem was to express the area of the sector of the circle aep in terms of the length of the line segment pq. For this purpose, he had to first find a series for the square root of 1 – x^2. He found this by a type of guesswork he learned from John Wallis. This result was Newton’s discovery of the binomial theorem for real exponents as opposed to just positive integer exponents. With this in hand Newton could obtain the expression for the area ape. You can read this in his hand: Then is the superficies ape = x – x square root 1 – xx – a series.”
Description: Mixed Media.
2011
Photos: Aixa M. Holt