The Greatest Mathematician of all Time

For those of you who have taken or are currently taking Precalculus Honors, recall the 'hierarchy' of mathematicians:

() indicates information from wikipedia; refer to [ ] for a narrative.

at the top, we have:

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) [i'll gradually hate this guy more and more as i learn more physics and eventually calculus]

then, in no particular order:

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) [never heard of him]
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) [euler's line; bad memories from that PCH test =/]
Archimedes (287 BC-212 BC) [well, he has no first name. what a baller. also, he's pretty old]

And just like everyone else, I don't care about second, third, or fourth place.
Which leaves us only with Newton. Cool. Now to examine one of his laws of physics that we diligently read about and encounter every day:

(Lex I: Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare. Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.)

Latin really is useless. The English translation is still a foreign language. Let's try this again:

An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by a force.

Well. Here's my "object at rest." Common sense dictates that if I were to leave it alone, it won't go anywhere.

A 'force' magically appears; object at rest is no longer
at rest!

Now, recall the second part of Newton's first law:

An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by a force.

I don't know who said it, but "all good things must come to an end." Experience and common sense both indicate that my object, even a pretty generic prize from Family Fair two years ago, will eventually stop rolling. Even without me stopping it. And so, Newton's first law is madness. Blasphemy.


Actually, Newton was the greatest mathematician of all time. And so, he probably wasn't wrong. Of course not. My object stopped without the help of any observable force, but from the
forces of friction and air resistance (kinetic friction, I guess, since the object was moving). These same forces apply to almost every object in our everyday lives; what kind of messed up world would it be if nothing stopped moving, ever?


Well, once again, all good things must come to an end.