| Abstrakt: |
Having been asked in February 1700 by The Royal Society to respond to G. W. Leibniz's letter from Hanover about the decision of the German states to accept a so-called ‘improved calendar’, Isaac Newton, then Master of the Mint, developed a proposal for the reform of the Julian and Ecclesiastical calendars that was later found among his unpublished manuscripts (now grouped as Yahuda MS 24). His calendar, if implemented, would have become for England a viable alternative to the Gregorian. Despite having a different algorithm, its solar part agrees with the latter until ad2400 and is more precise in the long run, within a period of 5000 years. Although Newton's lunar algorithm is more elegant than the Gregorian, his Ecclesiastical calendar remained incomplete. We explain why blank spaces were left and data were changed in several of the manuscripts, discuss the time frame and the order in which Newton wrote different drafts of Yahuda MS 24, analyse their relation with three manuscripts from the Cambridge collection, and suggest a reason for Newton's delay and failure to press for the implementation of his calendar. Newton, as can be discerned from his statistical analysis of Hipparchus's equinox observations, can be credited, historically, with the first application of the technique known today as linear regression analysisand also with a remarkable guess about the ancient Greek observations of the equinoxes that recently has been confirmed. |
