The Other Newton

Historyish

No, not the cookie, the legend.

Many people are rightly aware of the great Sir Isaac Newton, famous for a wide range of accomplishments and advancements in the fields of science and mathematics, but it may surprise you to learn that Sir Isaac was not the only Newton to push the boundaries of knowledge.

His younger brother, Percival Newton, was also an incredibly talented scientist and mathematician, though his contributions have been so overshadowed by those of his brother that he is all but lost to history.

While his brother is often contributed with the development of calculous as used in his book “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, Percival spent years developing his own branch of mathematics, Ultraddere, as a result of continual in depth study of Numerology. Unfortunately most people in the mathematical community rejected the use of Ultraddere as being both highly redundant, with the claim that it was ultimately simply adding things a lot, and being highly prone to incorrect or non-representational results, stemming primarily of the method’s heavy use of the new “kludge” operation that Percival added along side the more usual add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The kludge operation, represented by a symbol that resembled a the lower case “b” and “d” joined on the stem, would instruct the mathematician to simply combine its operands into a number that “more or less looked right”. The other main feature of Ultraddere was the inclusion of what he termed a “Full Kludge” (represented by a normal kludge symbol followed by a large “O”), which worked in a similar manner to the more common “Sum” function in other fields of mathematics, operating over a large list of numbers, and would essentially create a rough estimate of what the numbers would add up to.

Like his brother, Percival also made many contributions to various scientific fields. He published a series of dissertations on the various noises made by animals outside of his window at three in the morning, a treatise on why particular teas tasted better than others, at least to him, and tracked the migratory patterns of local feral cats. He spent the last several years of his life working on his scientific magnum opus, a deeply comprehensive study and complex breakdown of the various species of cryptids of Great Britain. However he found great difficulty in getting his work published, partially because he was never able to actually locate a cryptid, and also because the scientific community in general lost confidence in him after it became public knowledge that he both believed in and strongly supported the “Tiny Earth” theory, which held that the world was in fact less than one quarter the size it is generally considered to be, and that in particular the continent of Australia was a complex and persistent hoax perpetrated by Illuminati.

And thus, with his mathematical theories derided and his major life’s work dismissed, Percival Newton slipped sadly away into his brother’s shadow, his legacy lost to the world.