Calculus and the Enlightenment Newton’s picture of a world ruled by mathematics reverberated far beyond science. In the humanities, it served as a foil for Romantic poets like William Blake, John Keats, and William Wordsworth. At a raucous dinner party in 1817, Wordsworth and Keats, among others, agreed that Newton had destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colors. They raised their glasses in a boisterous toast: “Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics.” Newton got a warmer
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