Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow

by Mordechai Feingold (Editor)

A comprehensive reevaluation of Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), one of the more prominent and intriguing of all seventeenth-century men of science. Barrow is remembered today--if at all--only as Sir Isaac Newton's mentor and patron, but he in fact made important contributions to the disciplines of optics and geometry. Moreover, he was a prolific and influential preacher as well as a renowned classical scholar. By seeking to understand Barrow's mathematical work, primarily within the confines of the pre-Newtonian scientific framework, the book offers a substantial rethinking of his scientific acumen. In addition to providing a biographical study of Barrow, it explores the intimate connections among his scientific, philological, and religious worldviews in an attempt to convey the complexity of the seventeenth-century culture that gave rise to Isaac Barrow, a breed of polymath that would become increasingly rare with the advent of modern science.

396 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 1990

About the author

Mordechai Feingold (D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1980; M.A., 1976; B.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1972) is an intellectual and institutional historian of science, from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, and has served as Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of the History of Science and the Humanities at Caltech since 2019. Previously he was Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia.

His research focuses on how the rise of modern science has transformed Western culture from a humanistic, religious, and unified culture during the sixteenth century into a scientific, technological, secular, and fragmented one by the nineteenth century.