"NEWTON'S (ORIGINAL) METHOD
-- or --
THOUGH THIS BE METHOD, YET THERE IS MADNESS IN'T"
This talk sketches the life and career of Isaac Newton
– including his nasty skirmishes with Leibniz over the creation of the
calculus – before considering in greater detail the method he advocated
for approximating solutions to equations. We examine his lone example
of this approximation technique and compare it to what is now called “Newton’s
Method.” The presentation features roughly equal doses of history,
biography, and mathematics and is accessible to anyone acquainted with
calculus.