You're Stupid

Day 1,248, 01:04 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by Bhane

Have you ever done anything that you thought to be very clever? Have you ever thought to yourself how brilliant your latest insight was? We all need to be humbled from time to time. The next time you are feeling very smart and need to deflate your ego a bit, remember this story...




Does anyone love integral calculus? Personally, I love it. Derivatives and differential math are so much fun. The curve of a curve shows us so much. Anyway, if you hate it or love it, it has a great origin story.


Isaac Newton is probably the most genius mathematician ever. You can argue that it's Einstein or Hawking or any other number of valid candidates. But, I'm sticking with Newton because of this story.

So, Newton comes up with his laws of motion, and gravity, and force. You know that already. A friend of Newton said to him, "If these laws of motion work the way you say they do, then why are orbits ellipses, instead of perfect circles?" Newton had no clue. He told his friend he would look into that and get back to him with an answer. Newton spent the next few months doing some math. In order to find the answer for his friend, he INVENTED integral calculus.

That's right, all those huge thick books on integral calculus, all those advanced college courses, all those solutions to physics problems that integral calculus has given us...
... It was all created ON A DARE!!!
His friend asked a simple question, and Newton had to create an entire genre of calculus to answer him. AND he did it in a couple months!!!
... one more thing... he did this at age 25!!!


So, the next time you're stumped by integral calculus, just remember that Newton figured it all out from scratch in just a few months. Not because he had to, but just for kicks, so he could answer a friend's question. Then you can feel sufficiently inadequate.


Now we can all appreciate how truly stupid we are. 😉