Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 6/7/1990
EAN 9780521306942, ISBN10: 0521306949

Hardcover, 396 pages, 23.4 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm
Language: English

A comprehensive re-evaluation of Isaac Barrow (1630–1677), one of the more prominent and intriguing of all seventeenth-century men of science. Barrow is remembered today - if at all - only as Sir Isaac Newton's mentor and patron, but he in fact made important contributions to the disciplines of optics and geometry. Moreover, he was a prolific and influential preacher as well as a renowned classical scholar. By seeking to understand Barrow's mathematical work, primarily within the confines of the pre-Newtonian scientific framework, the book offers a substantial rethinking of his scientific acumen. In addition to providing a biographical study of Barrow, it explores the intimate connections among his scientific, philological and religious worldviews in an attempt to convey the complexity of the seventeenth-century culture that gave rise to Isaac Barrow, a breed of polymath that would become increasingly rare with the advent of modern science.

List of contributors
Editor's preface
1. Isaac Barrow
divine, scholar, mathematician Mordechai Feingold
2. The Optical Lectures and the foundations of the theory of optical imagery Alan E. Shapiro
3. Barrow's mathematics
between ancients and moderns Michael S. Mahoney
4. Isaac Barrow's academic milieu
Interregnum and Restoration Cambridge John Gascoigne
5. Barrow as a scholar Anthony Grafton
6. The preacher Irène Simon
7. Isaac Barrow's library Mordechai Feingold
Index.