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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

I think Newton was, especially to women. But Da Vinci strikes me as much more cordial and eager to fit into higher society, at least in his younger years.

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Out curiosity - how do you (both you and GP) come up with your conclusions without ever having met any of these people personally?

It's a bit like the portrayal of Steve Jobs. Sure, I can read testimonies about how he was an asshole - but how would I know for sure?

Just triangulation and heuristics based on accounts of them and their own letters to others. Such as http://www.businessinsider.com/leonardo-da-vinci-cover-lette...

Also Leonardo was a vegetarian, and that's another data point. It's all based on correlation basically.

You can never know for sure but with enough data points you can draw some conclusions. For example, it seems Wozniak was/is a very nice guy where Jobs was a more difficult guy to say the least.

I’ve read some of Newton’s letters while doing research at the Royal Society archives. He definitely comes off as severely deficient in social skills just from the random sampling I looked at - I think one was complaining about his land lady offering him food. Granted, it’s impossible to know many things “for sure” in history but “Newton had a difficult personality” is a pretty good bet, based on those letters and the bios I’ve read.

Another fun fact from the letters - Newton invited the con artist George Psalmanazar over for lunch at some point circa 1703. Psalmanazar claimed to be a Taiwanese prince but had long blonde hair and a faint French accent. Unclear if Newton was taken in, but Halley was able to stump him with an astronomy-based question. Sounds like something from the Baroque Cycle but it all really happened.

> Halley was able to stump him with an astronomy-based question.

Why would a Taiwanese prince have to be an expert in Astronomy?

I suppose Halley asked him about something anybody in Taiwan would know about the sky there, but not common knowledge for people in France.

Yeah, he asked him if there was ever a time of year when the sun shone directly down Taiwanese chimneys. Psalmanazar said no, not realizing that Taiwan was on the tropic of cancer. He attempted to recover from his mistake by saying that chimneys in Taiwan were Z-shaped.

Oh, that's really interesting, thanks!

Actions. Newton’s actions depict a miserable prick, Jobs’ an intelligent sociopath, etc. Jobs died because he thought he was smarter than medicine when it came to beating cancer; hardly the first self-destructive and impulsive action in his record. Newton probed his own eyeball, tried to erase Hooke from history, etc.

Unless you're a doctor who treated Jobs, I doubt we can make any claim about whether his choices killed him or not.

Let's not forget that Jobs underwent a surgery to remove the first round of cancer, and then ended up getting a liver transplant (probably because his pancreatic cancer has metastised into this organ as well). Because of the immunosuppressive medication one has to take for the rest of one's life after a transplant, recurring cancer is extremely dangerous because the cancer can grow unbounded.

I don't really see how surgery and a transplant align with "smarter than medicine."

He chose no radiation and no chemo, which for that cancer is insane; this has been pretty well documented for years now.

In addition to what others have said, meeting someone in person doesn't automatically give you good insight into their character, either.

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