Hoskin and Whiteside were joined by Adolf Prag (1906–2004) to edit the eight volume Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (1967 to 1981).
[3] Reviewing the first volume of the work, Christoph Scriba wrote, it "...must be praised the extraordinary care and conscientiousness of the editor who collected, organized, transcribed and edited the wealth of material in a superb way.
"[6] Tanner also reviewed volume 2 and its concern with Gerhard Kinckhuysen's Dutch textbook on algebra,[7] partially translated into Latin by Nicholas Mercator, and worked on by Newton until the project was abandoned in 1676.
[3] Tom and Ruth Whiteside had two children, Simon and Philippa,[11] to whom volume 8 of Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton was dedicated.
Whiteside says that the most important influence on Newton's mathematical development was Book II of René Descartes's La Géométrie.
[13] Book II is devoted to a problem that had been considered and partly solved by Pappus of Alexandria and Apollonius of Perga.
The rest of Descartes's Book II is occupied with showing that the cubic curves arise naturally in the study of optics from the Snell-Descartes Law.