| 27 Mar 2023 | 17.00-18.30 | Room SG1 Alison Richards Building, Sidgwick Site, Cambridge | |
- Description
Description
Speakers: Scott Mandelbrote (Cambridge), William R. Newman (Indiana), Marc Adam Kolakowski (Geneva).
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is famous as a natural philosopher, mathematician, and public servant. His archive survives very largely complete and has opened up knowledge of his work on chronology, chemistry, and religion.
Despite this, significant questions remain which derive from the nature of the survival of the archive. By a variety of processes of sorting and resorting, in Newton’s lifetime, after Newton’s death by his heirs, at later stages by readers or archivists, including the committee that formed the ‘Portsmouth papers’ collection in the University Library at Cambridge, and through the activities of the auction house and the book trade, the archive has been subdivided, rearranged, and dispersed.
The speakers will explore the history of the archive and some methods for its reconstruction, with a concentration on the analysis of the materials from which the archive was formed.
CDH, Cambridge University Library, University of Indiana: Digital Approaches to the Capture and Analysis of Watermarks, funded by the AHRC and the NEH.
