Revisiting a Young Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton is typically portrayed as a solitary scientist with intense focus who was obsessed with power and deeply egotistical. But a new book by Caltech historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold takes a deeper look at Newton’s life in the two decades leading up to the 1687 publication of his groundbreaking text, Principia Mathematica , when he was 44. Utilizing newly digitized scans of Newton’s early writings, Buchwald and Feingold uncover a novel portrait of the young polymath as a curious and social scholar whose interests were often fleeting.