Most people in the United States — Christian or otherwise — recognize December 25 as Christmas Day. For some, the day remembers the birth of Jesus Christ, for others it’s a celebration of family, an excuse to give gifts and party during the darkest part of the year. And for many, it’s all of the above. But for Patrick Ivers, a retired math teacher from Laramie, December 25 is a day to remember the discovery of calculus. Wyoming Public Radio’s Jeff Victor asked Ivers about his unorthodox holiday tradition.
Jeff Victor: You recognize something called Newton's Mass? Can you tell me about that? What is Newton's Mass?
Patrick Ivers: Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642. And so, since I'm not a Christian — or at least no longer — I celebrate what I call Newton's Mass. And my wife and I have an apple pie. And I send out, to all my friends and family, my Happy Newton's Mass greeting, which is a celebration of Sir Isaac Newton’s life and some interesting connections with the holiday season.
JV: So do you do any Christmas stuff too or is it strictly Newton's Mass?
PI: It’s impossible not to do something Christmas because it's what dominates the season here. My wife puts up a wall hanging of a tree that she has ornaments on that she got from Venezuela. So I guess that's sort of Christmas. But I pretty much would be a debunker. I refer to it as ‘Crass Mass.’
JV: How long have you been doing this?
PI: About 20 years. I wrote a piece about it to the Denver Post at the time, and they published it. And I thought it was unique to me, I had not come across it [before]. And then I discovered maybe 15 years ago, there was a group in New York City and they had a little piece in The New York Times. So there are a few others out there like me, but I've never come across anybody personally that celebrates as I do. But when people wish me ‘Merry Christmas!’ I say, ‘Happy Newton's Mass!’
JV: Were you actively searching for a secular alternative? Or did you just come across it?
PI: I just came across it. It was just by happenstance that I was reading something and I realized, ‘Hey … December 25th … I hadn't realized that.’ So now I've got something else that I can celebrate that’s definitely [about] someone who was born on December 25th. Because if you follow the Scripture, it could not have been late December that Jesus was born. We have shepherds with their flocks, and they don't have flocks out there in the cold of December.
JV: So tell me a little bit more about Isaac Newton. Why should we focus more on Newton and less on Nativity?
PI: Isaac Newton — and I should also include Gottfried Leibniz — invented the calculus. So we wouldn't have calculus today, at least not as soon as we have it, if it hadn't been for Sir Isaac Newton.
He came up with it during the plague. He had to leave — I think he was at Cambridge — and go home where his mother was living. And he came up with the calculus and then he devised the formula for gravity, F=ma [Newton’s second law of motion], and then he also did a lot of work with optics. In effect, Sir Isaac Newton's birth was the birth of the scientific revolution.
JV: I think that's everything I've got for you. Is there anything else people should know about Newton's Mass?
PI: Not about Newton's Mass. But there's something else that I put in my greeting. Sir Isaac Newton, again, was born on December 25, 1642. And he said he stood on the shoulders of giants. And 50 weeks prior to his birth, one of the greats, Galileo, died, on January 8, 1642. If you go 300 years in advance from that, you reach the birth of Stephen Hawking on January 8, 1942. Stephen Hawking, then 76 years later, died on March 14 — Pi Day — which, coincidentally, was also Einstein's birthday. That's an incredible series of coincidences of dates.
JV: How did you put all those numbers together?
PI: Just by happenstance. I mean, I knew Einstein's birthday and Pi Day were the same. And then when Stephen Hawking died, it was March 14. That was just what, three or four years ago?
JV: Yeah — well, thanks for telling me all about Newton's Mass today.
PI: And anybody who wants to celebrate Newton's Mass, it's a secular holiday and you don't have to be of any religious faith. And even if you are, you can still celebrate his birthday because it really happened.
(A New York Times opinion columnist wrote about Newton’s birthday as an alternative to Christmas in 2008. Her column concludes with an original alternative to The Twelve Days of Christmas song.)
