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James Gleick's Biography of Isaac Newton

2 February 2004

Over the Christmas break I read a very well-written biography of Isaac Newton written by James Gleick. This is a book I warmly recommend to everybody in the community not only for its masterful portrait of a great scientist, but also for describing the birth of the peer-review process and of the role of scientific publication as we know it in the scientific enterprise. The controversies between Newton and other great scientists like Leibniz, Hooke, Wallis and others would never have arisen had Newton published his work in a timely fashion. Read the book's chapter entitled "Nobody is Witness in his own Cause" and think about Newton's behaviour, marvel at it, and learn from the happenings described there.

If you are interested in knowing more about the book before reading it, I recommend Freeman Dyson's review, and the one by Steven Krantz in the Notices of the AMS. Three good reads about peer-review in general, and about the birth of peer-review, are:

• Opinion 3: The Demise of the `Anonymous' Referee by Doron Zeilberger.

• Peer and non-peer review by Andrew Odlyzko.
• The peer-review process by Fytton Rowland, Learned Publishing 15:247-258 (2002).

I am back in Aalborg, where the spring semester starts again today. Fingers crossed!