The Anagram Letter

LITIn his second letter for Leibniz (the Epistola posterior, dated 24 October 1676, sent through Oldenburg and received in 1677), Newton hid the core of his method of fluxions as a letter inventory:

6accdae13eff7i3l9n4o4qrr4s8t12ux

It counts the letters of "Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitates involvente, fluxiones invenire; et vice versa", "given an equation involving any number of fluent quantities, to find the fluxions, and vice versa" (the fundamental theorem of calculus, in his terms). Only the author could later produce the sentence, so it fixed his priority without revealing the method: a trusted timestamp. Dave's ledger, below, does the same job with SHA-256.

MEASUREDThe page recounts it live, with Newton's conventions (u = v, the diphthong æ counted as one sign). It does not quite match: the sentence has 9 t's, the inventory says 8 (an off-by-one noted by mathpages and others; whether Newton or a copyist slipped is not known).

EMERGENTWatch the sentence fall apart into the inventory: letters drift to their alphabetical piles. Then seal your own claim: type any sentence, get its Newton-style inventory, and the ledger timestamps it.

seal my claim scatter again