The Correspondence of John Flamsteed: The First Astronomer Royal, Volume Two contains the letters Flamsteed wrote and received from June 1682 to the spring of 1703. A leading figure in the final phases of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, his extensive correspondence with 129 British and foreign scholars touches on many of the scientific discussions of the day. Some of these exchanges involved established correspondents, chiefly Newton and Wallis, but members of a younger generation, such as Stephen Gray, William Derham, and Abraham Sharp, appear with increasing frequency, especially after 1700.

A collection of the many biographies of scientist Isaac Newton, demonstrating the ways in which his reputation continued to develop in the centuries after his death. It includes private letters, poetry and memoranda, and explores the debate over Newton's reputation, work and personal life.

When Newton was not yet twenty-five years old, he formulated calculus, hit upon the idea of gravity, and discovered that white light was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. By 1678, Newton designed a telescope to study the movement of the planets and published Principia, a milestone in the history of science, which set forth his famous laws of motion and universal gravitation. Newton’s long-time research on calculus, finally made public in 1704, triggered a heated controversy as European scientists accused him of plagiarizing the work of the German scientist Gottfried Leibniz. In this third volume in the acclaimed Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series, bestselling author Peter Ackroyd provides an engaging portrait of Isaac Newton, illuminating what we think we know about him and describing his seminal contributions to science and mathematics. A man of wide and eclectic interests, Newton blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation: he was as passionate about astrology as astronomy and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his determination to interpret a modern universe as a mathematical universe. By brining vividly to life a somewhat puritanical man whose desire to experiment and explore bordered on the obsessive, Peter Ackroyd demonstrates the unique brilliance of Newton’s perceptions, which changed our understanding of the world.

Flamsteed's edited papers, published in 1835, over a century after his death, restored his reputation as a meticulous observational astronomer.