Sir Isaac Newton is certainly one of the greatest scientists to have ever lived. He is generally reckoned to have been one of the three most outstanding mathematicians of all time, along with Archimedes and Gauss, and his discoveries in physics are unrivalled in their width and influence. What was Newton's secret? How did he achieve as much as he did? Obviously there is no simple answer, but Newton had one secret, which he guarded jealously, and which he believed to be vital. It was ‘Data aequatione quotainque fluentes quantitoe involuente fluxions invenire et vice versa’ or in English ‘solve differential equations’.

Nowadays this ‘secret’ is entirely unremarkable; we are all aware that many processes and phenomena in the world are governed by differential equations. The very fact that Newton's secret is now common knowledge clearly indicates its worth and power. Of course his secret was rather hard won; he did have to invent differential equations before pronouncing his dictum concerning solving them!

In this chapter we shall see what the microcomputer can do for those intending to follow Newton's advice. Our eventual viewpoint will be considerably more modern than Newton's. It turns out that in certain circumstances solving differential equations is not as useful as watching them.

Differential equations and tangent segments

Much of science is devoted to the problems of predicting the future Differential behaviour of some physical system or other. Often the underlying equations and physical law will describe the rate at which the system evolves; what tangent segments we require is a description of how it evolves.