About the book
Isaac Newton And Above All
The play Isaac and Amanda is among other things a love story about Isaac Newton and a woman named Amanda. It also contains material about the conflicts that Newton had with the scientist Robert Hooke and the mathematician Leibniz. The latter conflict deals with the issue of who should receive credit for the discovery of Calculus. Furthermore, it deals with that period of Newtons life when he was an official in the Mint (the equivalent in the United States of the Treasury Department) trying to solve Britains currency problems and his difficulties with the master counterfeiter Challoner and especially Challoners wife. Finally, it brings up the issue of Newtons year when he was so depressed that some people say he had a nervous breakdown. Some of the material in Isaac and Amanda is to be found in the play On the Shoulders of Giants, written by the same authors.
About the author
Arthur Ziffer
Previous to this publication, the author has eight publications of plays. Two of them are plays about the famous mathematician, Isaac Newton, with titles “On the Shoulders of Giants” and “Isaac and Amanda.” These were co-authored with Herbert Hauptman, the first mathematician to win the Nobel Prize. He won it in 1985 in chemistry (since there is no prize in mathematics) for his work in crystallography. Three of the author’s plays are about Masada, a place in Israel near the Dead Sea with titles Masada Revisited, Masada Revisited II and Masada Revisited III. After the war between the Romans and the Jews in 66-70 AD, the last surviving stronghold of the Jews was the mountaintop fortress at Masada. According to the historian Josephus, the Romans besieged the fortress for three years and when the Jews realized that the fortress would be taken they committed mass suicide. The author has also written two plays about countertransference in psychotherapy with titles “Countertransference,” and “Retribution.”