Writing of Principia Mathematica

Isaac Newton composed Principia Mathematica during 1685 and 1686, and it was published in a first edition on 5 July 1687. Widely regarded as one of the most important works in both the science of physics and in applied mathematics during the Scientific Revolution, the work underlies much of the technological and scientific advances from the Industrial Revolution (usually dated from 1750) which it helped to create.

Authoring Principia

Work begins

Between 1685 and 1686, Newton had a very extensive correspondence with John Flamsteed, who was then the astronomer-royal. Many of the letters are lost but it is clear from one of Newton's, dated 19 September 1685, that he had received many useful communications from Flamsteed, especially regarding Saturn, "whose orbit, as defined by Kepler," Newton "found too little for the sesquialterate proportions." Newton refers to Kepler's third law, that the orbital period is proportional to the distance from the sun to the power of 3/2 ("sesquialteral" comes from the Latin word for the ratio 3/2).

Principia Mathematica

I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down books, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated....

The Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. In 1927, it appeared in a second edition with an important Introduction To the Second Edition, an Appendix A that replaced ✸9 and an all-new Appendix C.

PM, as it is often abbreviated, was an attempt to describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven. As such, this ambitious project is of great importance in the history of mathematics and philosophy, being one of the foremost products of the belief that such an undertaking may be achievable. However, in 1931, Gödel's incompleteness theorem proved definitively that PM, and in fact any other attempt, could never achieve this lofty goal; that is, for any set of axioms and inference rules proposed to encapsulate mathematics, either the system must be inconsistent, or there must in fact be some truths of mathematics which could not be deduced from them.

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Latin for "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), often referred to as simply the Principia, is a work in three books by Sir Isaac Newton, in Latin, first published 5 July 1687. After annotating and correcting his personal copy of the first edition, Newton also published two further editions, in 1713 and 1726. The Principia states Newton's laws of motion, forming the foundation of classical mechanics, also Newton's law of universal gravitation, and a derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion (which Kepler first obtained empirically). The Principia is "justly regarded as one of the most important works in the history of science".

The French mathematical physicist Alexis Clairaut assessed it in 1747: "The famous book of mathematical Principles of natural Philosophy marked the epoch of a great revolution in physics. The method followed by its illustrious author Sir Newton ... spread the light of mathematics on a science which up to then had remained in the darkness of conjectures and hypotheses." A more recent assessment has been that while acceptance of Newton's theories was not immediate, by the end of a century after publication in 1687, "no one could deny that" (out of the Principia) "a science had emerged that, at least in certain respects, so far exceeded anything that had ever gone before that it stood alone as the ultimate exemplar of science generally."