SOURCE: "Sources and Strengths of Newton's Early Mathematical Thought," in The Texas Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3, Autumn 1967, pp. 69-85.

In the following excerpt, Whiteside traces the development of Newton's mathematical thought and comments on his achievements in calculus.

In this tercentenary year we celebrate, in spirit if perhaps not with full historical accuracy, the first maturing of Newton the exact scientist. Persuaded by a wealth of pleasant traditional anecdote and autobiographical reminiscence, our thoughts go back three hundred years to a young Cambridge student, at twenty-three scarcely on the brink of manhood, working away undisturbed in a cramped, roughhewn study set in a sunny corner of the small stone house where he was born, amidst the lazy, undulating fields of his native Lincolnshire countryside. The busy intellectual stir of the university at which he recently graduated and the daily excitements of student life at Trinity College are eighty...