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place of the round caps that the Puritans had preferred. A Royalist academic joked that Puritan fellows who hastily changed their caps had solved an ancient mathematical problem: they had “squared the circle.” Historians can trace in great detail the development of Newton’s ideas from the time he came to Cambridge. He seems to have kept almost every scrap of paper on which he ever wrote. This helps modern scholars to clearly understand the way Newton’s mind developed. The university required him to learn his science from the works of the famous Greek thinker, Aristotle, who had lived in the fourth century bce . Isaac’s notebooks discuss the ideas of Aristotle. But they also discuss the ideas of more recent thinkers, like Galileo Galilei of Italy and René Descartes of France. These thinkers had challenged Aristotle and suggested that nature must be studied and explained in a different way. Newton studied the ancient ideas because he would be examined on them. He was not a slavish follower of the more recent thinkers and made some shrewd criticisms. Still, he took it for granted that scientific study must now follow a different path.

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