Newton, The Man

Abstract

It is with some diffidence that I try to speak to you in his own home of Newton as he was himself. I have long been a student of the records and had the intention to put my impressions into writing to be ready for Christmas Day 1942, the tercentenary of his birth. The war has deprived me both of leisure to treat adequately so great a theme and of opportunity to consult my library and my papers and to verify my impressions. So if the brief study which I shall lay before you to-day is more perfunctory than it should be, I hope you will excuse me.

Read by Sir Geoffrey Keynes at the Newton Tercentenary Celebrations at Trinity College, Cambridge, on 17 July 1946, and therefore not revised by the author who had written it some years earlier.