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Comment by 123e1daAdfafsdf | Hacker News Reader

In one of the recent books I read, I've heard that Newton didn't want his material accessible, as it would keep out the dilettantes. He wanted only a select few to understand a lot of what he wrote, which is part of the reason they're difficult.

(I think it was either Gleick's book on Information Theory, or the Drunkard's Walk, but it could have been any of the half dozen books I've been absorbed into lately)

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Well, my information is a bit different. During his time, there were many amateur mathematicians around. And Newton had a long standing beef with Leibnitz (Who was the chair of the Royal Society at the time). Whenever Newton published any paper, these wayward mathematicians used to ridicule his ideas, which infuriated Newton. That's why he decided to write in such sophisticated and grandiloquent language, such that these dabblers won't understand what he has written, to teach them a lesson (Irony, ROFL!! :D)

Small corrections: while he did indeed have a rivalry with Leibnitz (over who invented Calculus), Leibnitz was German, and therefor not likely to be chair of the Royal Society. You are probably thinking of Hooke whom he also had a rivalry with.

Yeah, he seems to have had a bit of a personality issue and clashed a lot with everyone around him.

Newton dabbled in alchemy and the occult. He was working at a time when the modern scientific mindset was still in beta. The idea of open publication seems self-evidently sensible today, but in the 17th century it was still waging a battle with obscurantism.

They're difficult because only a select few did understand what he was writing, and he had to hack and mangle his work into the form of the standard mathematics of his day.

Modern science and mathematics would be just as unapproachable if everything were required to be expressed in some standard-but-largely-inelegant framework in order to be taken seriously.

I wish I could find the source for this, but I remember reading that Gauss idolized Newton for his style. From what Gauss (and a tiny bit of Newton) I have read, it seems like he didn't like to provide any sorts of motivation or exposition. So, FWIW there's a second anecdote in support of this idea.

> He wanted only a select few to understand a lot of what he wrote

And thus he created a writing style that is predominant to this day! :(

Yeah it's the opposite of the Nigerian prince scam which is designed to filter out respondents with any intelligence or common sense.

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