Isaac Newton's Accomplishments

Sir Isaac Newton has been repeatedly portrayed since the last quarter of his life as practically peerless as a natural philosopher. Newton's achievements were unquestionably useful, diverse and exceptionally inspired (although not all of his work has endured). Fara recounts contemporary, repeated declarations of his seemingly unbelievable skill with mathematics and physics, ones which eventually evolved into the construction of a semi-divine genius1. This theme has continued to the present day. Even within academic accounts, praise of Newton is still unusually superlative and accounts individually focused. For example, Westfall has called the Principalia Mathematica (1686) the “culmination of the scientific revolution2” in outlining the basic

Attribution has also been questioned. As well as the thorny problem of conceptually defining the European “Scientific Revolution”10 and where Newton fits into it, other contributory figures such as Hooke and Leibniz have increasingly come into focus. These revelations exist uneasily with a still-influential emphasis upon folkish interpretations. Typically, these continue to favour Newton's timeless purity engendering a single minded pursuit of

The roles that the image of Newton has played will be discussed, as well as the ways that authors and historians have edited a complex reality to their personal ends. Why Newton has been (and is) portrayed as the supreme scientific genius is a pressing point. Thematic trends will be identified, and the extent of their influence upon both history and modernity will be dissected. Modern historiography will also be examined, in order to establish how a greater body of sources and social drive to uncover a more nuanced picture have changed biography. A summary will be made of how our picture of Newton has been directed and metamorphosed over time, and of the various roles Newton has been (and is still) made to fit.

Divorced from his science and the technical disputes that followed, the process of defining Newton as a man and natural philosopher represents a three century struggle for the cultural soul of seemingly irrepressible “natural” genius. Dobbs once warned that Newton was a “Rorschach test” for historians, in that each era has seen what it wishes to see in the enigma of his life course11, a point reiterated by