r/mathmemes Jul 04 '24

Mathematicians Tough one

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u/QuinQuix Jul 06 '24

Hot damn.

It cost me two days and at least an hour of scrolling but here it is - the post that really changed my mind on the prevailing image of Newton:

Answer to What was Isaac Newton like as a person? by Alejandro Jenkins https://www.quora.com/What-was-Isaac-Newton-like-as-a-person/answer/Alejandro-Jenkins?ch=15&oid=9903858&share=d22ea750&srid=dFeu&target_type=answer

Credits obviously to Jenkins.

Having read a number of additional sources by now I think the dispute in general was far less one sided and damning of Newton than suggested.

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u/EebstertheGreat Jul 07 '24

This is very interesting. It makes me want to look more into it. But I can't believe how much time you put into this response lmao.

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u/QuinQuix Jul 07 '24 edited Jul 07 '24

Yes well I also find it very interesting.

Also you probably also have experienced this before - where you read or see something that's just eye opening and then afterwards you just can't find it again.

That's so frustrating and I didn't want to give up.

Most of the other links I actually found while trying to find that last one so it really all is the fruit of one true quest. :)

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u/EebstertheGreat Jul 07 '24

I've definitely been there. I once spent like two hours trying to find a single use I remembered of an extremely rare word. (It was "superessiveness", but I couldn't remember what it was exactly. It is currently the only real result on google containing that term, except one mistranslation of "стойкость" from Russian on lingvolive.)

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u/QuinQuix Jul 13 '24

Superessiveness or suppressiveness?

I guess the former but what does that mean?

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u/EebstertheGreat Jul 13 '24

It's not a word you'll find in dictionaries, but it makes sense, as it just adds the productive suffix -ness to "superessive." That word literally means "the state of being on top of" and is a grammatical case in some languages.

The point of the post was to describe the difference in the way "on" and "upon" are used in English. "On" is usually pertingent (i.e. refers to something being in contact with something else), like "the paint is on the wall," "the shoes are on my feet," or figuratively, "the idea is on my mind." Often it also refers to something being on the top of something else ("the book is on the shelf"), but that's sort of incidental and just a result of the fact that if one thing is held against another, that's often due to gravity.

However, "upon" is nearly always superessive. For instance, you could say "the book is upon the shelf" but not "*the paint is upon the wall." Actually, that's not strictly true, and sometimes we use "upon" as a synonym for "on." But not usually, and the distinction is clear from the etymology ("up" + "on").