Two great figures, Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren, dominate the histories of science and architecture in the late seventeenth century. We assume that every building constructed in London after the Great Fire was designed by Wren, and every step on the way to the understanding of universal gravitation and the nature of light was taken by Newton. Newton himself, in a letter to Robert Hooke, made the famous observation that every great scientist builds on the work of those who preceded him: ‘If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. But it is the man on the top of
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