The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette

Author:Jennifer Ouellette
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Reference
ISBN: 9780143117377
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

One week before Christmas in 1664, a comet streaked across the sky over England. Astrologers claimed it was an omen of impending apocalypse. One William Lilly predicted that this, combined with a lunar eclipse in January 1665, would bring “the sword, famine, pestilence, and mortality or plague.” Lilly was really hedging his bets—why not throw in a prediction of a zombie invasion or an asteroid strike while he was at it?—but his dire prediction came partially true. Pestilence was common in the rat-infested urban centers of England, and this led to a deadly outbreak of bubonic plague in London in the summer of 1665.

By October, one in ten Londoners had succumbed to the disease—over sixty thousand people. The government banned public meetings, but the epidemic spread to Cambridge, where the young Isaac Newton was in his second year of studies. The university closed, and Newton was forced to return to his country home in Grantham for over a year until the plague had run its course and the university opened its doors again in April 1667. And in that short time, he invented calculus, with no idea that it would one day be applied to study the spread of disease.

This was not the plague’s first appearance. Back in the Middle Ages, the plague decimated Western Europe, wiping out roughly one third of the population, some 25 million people. It could sweep through a region and wipe out entire villages in a matter of weeks. During the 1630s, various outbreaks of plague killed half the populations of affected cities. Similar numbers perished in an outbreak in Holland in the 1660s: A thousand people were dying each week in Amsterdam at the height of the outbreak. And the plague significantly culled the population of France during an outbreak between 1647 and 1649.

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