I stumbled onto your Mathematical Fiction web site while looking for items mentioned in Stephen Abbott's article in the MAA Focus. I teach History of Mathematics every now and then---in fact it's been History of Calculus since Edwards' book came out. I find that students are interested in the personalities of Newton and Leibniz, and I talk about them. (I usually bring in Fig Newtons and Bahlsen Leibniz cookies for the students to nibble at that time.)

Your notes on David Penner's play "Newton's Hooke" bring up those two and Hooke, a trio of touchy men. A couple of decades ago I read our library's copy of Robert Hooke's diary and found it quite a fascinating book. (By the time I had enough money to buy a copy, it was out of print.) A large number of scientists and other notables make their appearances and there is an appendix listing more than two hundred London coffeehouses that Hooke mentions. As you note, the diary does record his occasional sexual encounters, usually with his servant girl and later with his niece, who lived with him to keep his household, as well as occasionally with other women. The whole diary was in cipher, and the marks for the sexual encounters resisted decoding until long after the rest was broken. It was long conjectured that the marks for sex might have been alchemical symbols. I don't consider that Hooke was any more sex-obsessed than most men, then and now. Think, for example of Samuel Pepys, whose diaries contain many descriptions of sexual encounters and many more recountings of his lusts and attempts to "score" with one or another woman. Pepys even wrote many of those in ciphered Latin, perhaps in fear lest his uneducated wife might crack the ciphered English of his diaries. James Boswell, who loved his wife, had no less then nineteen documented bouts of venereal disease during the comparatively short time he lived in London. Although no authentic portrait of Hooke survives, he is known from many sources to have been "ill favoured," and is unlikely to have been pursued by groupies. (However, John Wilkes, a politician and acquaintance of Samuel Johnson, who was notoriously ugly, but who liked to place---and win---bets that he could drift over to a beauty at a party and go home with her.) Hence, Hooke's special indication when he does succeed. I remember that one of Hooke's entries mentions in passing that two sheets of paper upon which some milk had been spilled were stck together when it dried. Hooke records his intention to investigate this phenomenon at a later time. If he had he could have invented Elmer's Glue more than three hundred years earlier than Borden.

I have never seen any evidence that Newton was a repressed homosexual. English public schools, as well as Cambridge and Oxford, then as now, were notable for unrepressed homosexuality. Perhaps a writer has tried psychoanalysis-at-a-distance (in space-time), always risky. I have read that in fact Newton was very prudish, cutting off for life a man who had made a risque remark in Newton's presence. That doesn't rule out the possibility of students getting a crush on Newton, but he certainly was not the type to encourage them or even to form a casual relationship with them. (Certainly not a causal relationship!)

Because David Pinner is English---or at least has his stage work put on in England, his English audiences will recognize the word play in his title "Marks and Sparks," which is the hypocoristic name used by everyone there for the department store chain Marks & Spencer.