A Thought on Newton's Source for his Differentiation Notation

Consider Sir Isaac Newton's notation for derivatives[1]:

It occurred to me that Newton might have chosen this notation for the following reason:

Newton was an avid student of biblical studies and mysticism. He was fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic, and seems to have had at least passable knowledge of Arabic, based on that there are manuscripts with portions of the Rambam’s works, translated into Latin, by his own hand[2].

He produced a large body of works, containing his thoughts on a large number of matters, citing many familiar sources, such as Rashi and the ibn Ezra. From the selections discussed in footnote 2, he seems to have been familiar with Moreh Nevuchim, and professed a philosophy for himself very much along those lines.

Newton was therefore almost certainly familiar with the dot notation of the Tanach – that some letters are at some points written with dots over them, indicating that there is a secondary meaning, that word being also parsable with that letter deleted. I suspect that Newton might have found it pleasing to use that ancient notation for his own work.

I think that Newton might have found it particularly pleasing to do so, as in Moreh Nevuchim, the Rambam seems to be… uncomfortable with the mystical concepts that are associated with the planetary spheres in Aristotelian cosmology[3]. The painful need for the Rambam’s intellectual acrobatics around that is eliminated by Newton’s gravity and the consequences thereof[4].

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation#Newton.27s_notation

[2] http://moreshetsepharad.org/media/Newton_Mathematics_and_Esoteric_Knowledge.pdf

[3] Maimonides and the book that changed Judaism: secrets of The guide for the perplexed. [Micah Goodman].

[4] Although his largest difficulty would not be eliminated until Hubble and Einstein.