As if the mathematics weren't difficult enough, for the past 370 years scholars reading Isaac Newton's Principia have had to puzzle through a translation that hasn't been updated since Alexander Pope published the first "compleat" collection of his poetry.

Thomas Professor Emeritus of the History of Science I. Bernard Cohen '37 has unleashed the mysteries of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica--commonly referred to as the Principia--in the first English translation of the book since 1729.

The bulk of the Cohen's book, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy--which weighs in at an impressive 974 pages--consists of Newton's third and final edition of the Principia, although it includes footnotes referring to relevant text included in the other two editions.

Published with the new translation is Cohen's "A Guide to the Principia," a companion essay that introduces each section of the book and develops the main ideas.

"Some of the material is quite difficult for the reader," Cohen said. "This guide serves as a helper to understanding the concepts."

Students at Tufts University and the University of Western Ontario are already using Cohen's books.

In an interview with The Crimson, Cohen, who teaches a course at the Harvard Extension School and will be teaching at Boston College in the spring, seemed relieved, over a month after its release, that the book was finally published.

"I still look at the 950 pages of paper bound in that book, and ask myself, did I do that?" he said. "The difficulty is creating a translation that maintains the meaning of the original text. We know perfectly well what Newton is saying, and we know what his intentions were, but it often took us weeks to determine how to say it in English. It required creative energy--a lot of creative energy to translate hundreds of pages of very particular mathematical proofs."