ROGER COTES
Historically, man has reacted to phenomena whose causes were not understood in one of two diametrically opposed ways. Some of these are attributed to God or the Gods of the culture. Others were associated with the occult, the world of demons and the Devil. In this case, when Newton published his great work, he had no explanation of the cause of gravity. There were some who accused him of delving into the occult. Ironically, Newton himself was heavily into the occult—one of the puzzles about a great mind. The cause of gravity did not begin to be understood until the Higgs Boson was proven to exist in 2012 with the Super Hadron Collider.
Roger Cotes FRS was an English mathematician, known for working closely with Isaac Newton by proofreading the second edition of his famous book, the Principia, before publication. He also invented the quadrature formulas known as Newton–Cotes formulas, and made a geometric argument that can be interpreted as a logarithmic version of Euler's formula. He was the first Plumian Professor at Cambridge University from 1707 until his death.
