5 - Mathematics, law, and medicine

Summary

THE ORIGINS OF THE MATHEMATICAL TRIPOS

ISAAC NEWTON AND NEWTONIANISM

When Isaac Newton, a yeoman's son, entered Trinity College in June 1661 he brought from his grammar school in Grantham proficiency in Latin (an excellent preparation for his correspondence with foreign savants), some Greek, and skill in constructing working models of windmills and other contrivances. At Trinity he was put through the arts course prescribed by the Elizabethan statutes of the university, in which Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy, inherited from the medieval curriculum, had a prominent place. Such was the fate of other undergraduates in seventeenth-century Cambridge (and Oxford), a fact that has led scholars like Christopher Hill to criticise the universities as sterile, and hostile to the new science of Copernicus and Galileo. Such comments underestimate the value of Aristotelianism, not merely as mental gymnastics but as a persuasive cosmology that even practitioners of the new science like Bacon and William Harvey still in large measure accepted.

Aristotelianism was in fact a flexible system that accommodated discoveries, and in retaining it the universities did not exclude scientific advance. Many dons were interested in the new science, and knowledge of it percolated down to students through the unofficial curriculum, mediated by tutors, that complemented the official one. One of Newton's notebooks reveals that he read the work of the new scientists, Kepler, Galileo, Gassendi, and Descartes; and we know that much of Newton's impetus came from a desire to counter what he saw as Descartes's faulty reasoning.