On Dec 1, 11:34 pm, "Hendrik van Rooyen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Russ P." <Ru...gmail.com> wrote: > > I am surprised to see that Newton is not taken. I urge > > Guido to take it while it is still available. Sir Isaac > > certainly deserves the honor. > > Does he? Are you aware of how he treated Hooke? > > He was a great technician, but as a person, you would > not have had him marry your sister. > > - 1 on this silly "Newton" idea. > > - Hendrik
I neither know nor care much about Newton's personality and social graces, but I can assure you that he was more than a "technician" (no offense to technicians). If you just read the Wikipedia preamble about him you will realize that he is arguably the greatest scientist who ever lived. Sorry for the inefficient use of bandwidth, but I just couldn't refrain from copying it here: Sir Isaac Newton FRS (pronounced /ˈnjuːtən/) (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) [ OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727][1] was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist. His treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. He showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution. In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he invented the reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed the so-called "Newton's method" for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series. In a 2005 poll of the Royal Society of who had the greatest effect on the history of science, Newton was deemed more influential than Albert Einstein.[2] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
