On 12/22/2013 1:42 PM, Michael Marotta wrote:
Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, the year that Galileo died. Few people except numismatists know him to have been the Warden and Master of the British Royal Mint for thirty years. He had himself sworn as a justice of the peace so that he could pursue and prosecute counterfeiters.

For most people, Newton is famous for his Three Laws of Motion. Beyond that, those with additional education know him for creating the Calculus to prove his theories of celestial and terrestrial mechanics. In addition Newton invented the reflecting telescope as a result of his experiments with light. And he also proved the general case for the Binomial Theorem (“Pascal's Triangle”). He served in Parliament, representing Cambridge, where he had been a professor of mathematics. He served as president of the Royal Society of scientists. Any one of those achievements would have made important to us today. That he accomplished all of that - and more - set Sir Isaac Newton apart even from the geniuses and polymaths recorded by history.

Newton’s colleagues called him fearful, cautious, suspicious, insidious, ambitious, excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction. Even his relatives and his true friends were modest in their praise of Newton. Physically sound in his life, he died at 84. He had lost only one tooth, still had much of his hair, and read without glasses. Yet, he was a hypochondriac, suffering from illnesses and diseases that he treated with medicines he made for himself.

The full story of Newton’s tenure at the Mint is told in "Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist" by Thomas Levenson. Professor Levenson’s narratives in this book have the inclusive force of videos. He puts you on the teeming streets of London, inside the sweat and smoke of the Mint, down the dank alleys and into the rowdy, bawdy taverns where criminals swap and wager.

(If you search this Group for "Newtonmas" you will find some earlier greetings.)


Thanks for the interesting info, both coin-related and otherwise.