Feingold M. (ed.) Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow

Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2008. — 380 p.A comprehensive reevaluation of Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), one of the more prominent and intriguing of all seventeenth-century men of science. Barrow is remembered today - if at all - only as Sir Isaac Newton's mentor and patron, but he in fact made important contributions to the disciplines of optics and geometry. Moreover, he was a prolific and influential preacher as well as a renowned classical scholar. By seeking to understand Barrow's mathematical work, primarily within the confines of the pre-Newtonian scientific framework, the book offers a substantial rethinking of his scientific acumen. In addition to providing a biographical study of Barrow, it explores the intimate connections among his scientific, philological, and religious worldviews in an attempt to convey the complexity of the seventeenth-century culture that gave rise to Isaac Barrow, a breed of polymath that would become increasingly rare with the advent of modern science.Isaac Barrow: divine, scholar, mathematician (by Mordechai Feingold).
The Optical Lectures and the foundations of the theory of optical imagery (by Alan E. Shapiro).
Barrow's mathematics: between ancients and moderns (by Michael S. Mahoney).
Isaac Barrow's academic milieu: Interregnum and Restoration Cambridge (by John Gascoigne).
Barrow as a scholar (by Anthony Grafton).
The preacher (by Irène Simon).
Isaac Barrow's library (by Mordechai Feingold).