Someone I follow posted this awesome link to Newton’s notebooks stored in the Cambridge Digital Library (link link link!).

Now that I’ve got access to both Newton’s notes and Leibniz’ notes (thanks to checking out Dr. Wolfram’s awesome post on Leibniz’ archives), you can probably guess how freaking excited I am.

So. Graphology in itself is pretty much pseudoscience, but it’s still interesting to compare the writing styles of these two geniuses, just to see if any similarities/differences stand out. That’s allowed, right? (Screw it, I’m doing it anyway.)

A lot of Newton’s notes were written in English ‘cause…duh…he was an Englishman. From what I’ve read about Leibniz, I think he could read and write in English but not nearly as fluently as in several other languages; most of his work was in Latin, the rest in French and German. So I couldn’t find a good English excerpt from both. So let’s do Latin, just for the sake of keeping the language consistent.

Here’s a Newton page:

Look at his writing, it’s so neat! I’m no handwriting analyst or anything like that, but it looks like this section of Newton’s notes was written slowly and deliberately as if he’s just sitting there going, “yeah, I got this.” There are a few things crossed out, of course, but it looks like he took the time to carefully scratch them out and then just kept going. Slow but steady. And his numbers are so clear, too, holy crap.

The above is just a screenshot of a semi-magnified page; on the actual Cambridge site you can zoom in further and make out the English notes he made in the margin. If you look at a lot of other pages in this section of notes, Newton really seems to keep things very organized, even if it looks like he’s making scratch calculations in some parts.

And then there’s Leibniz:

I was planning to do both samples in Latin like I just said above, but I’m snatching pictures of Leibniz’ notes from Dr. Wolfram’s post on him so there aren’t nearly as many choices as with Newton. So I figured a more appropriate comparison would be pages written by both men that contained both words and numbers. I believe Leibniz’ page is written in French, but I seriously can only make out like three words here.

I’m not sure if it’s just because of different writing tools or different ink/paper, but Leibniz looks like he pressed fairly hard (or at least as hard as you could with a quill). Also, in contrast to Newton, it looks to me like Leibniz wrote pretty rapidly. Newton’s corrections were either neat single cross-outs or carefully scribbled out so the mistake couldn’t be read. All of Leibniz’ corrections look like, “no time for error must keep writing!” *scratchscratchscratch* “ONWARD!” Even his numbers look rushed (look, it’s binary!). It almost looks like he used this page for just those calculations but then wrote around them, continuing from a previous page.

On some of the other pages Leibniz really manages to get a lot on a single page. We’re talking ITTY BITTY scrawl, a consequence of his becoming very near-sided in his 20s and it only getting worse as he got older. I’m actually not sure how good (or bad) Newton’s vision was. Of course he did stick a darning needle back behind his eye and wiggled it around (optics experiment), so…

Anyway. Just an interesting thing to see the differences/similarities in their styles.