The Integrability of Ovals: Newton's Lemma 28 and Its Counterexamples

Principia (Book 1, Sect. 6), Newton's Lemma 28 on the algebraic nonintegrability of ovals has had an unusually mixed reception. Beginning in 1691 with Jakob Bernoulli (who accepted the lemma) and Huygens and Leibniz (who rejected it and offered counterexamples), Lemma 28 has a history of eliciting seemingly contradictory reactions. In more recent times, D.T. Whiteside in 1974 gave an “unchallengeable counterexample,” while the mathematician V.I. Arnol'd in 1987 sided with Bernoulli and called Newton's argument an “astonishingly modern topological proof.” This disagreement mostly stems, we argue, from Newton's vague statement of the lemma. Indeed, we identify several different interpretations of Lemma 28, any one of which Newton may have been intending to assert, and we then test a number of proposed counterexamples to see which, if any, are true counterexamples to one or more of these versions of the lemma. Following this, we study Newton's argument for the lemma to see whether and where it fails to be convincing. In the end, our study of Newton's Lemma 28 provides an answer to the question, Who is right: Huygens, Leibniz, Whiteside and the others who reject the lemma, or Bernoulli, Arnol'd, and the others who accept it? (Received November 6, 2000)