 Newton's study of Descartes' "Geometry" seems to have inspired him with a love of the subject, and introduced him to higher mathematics.In a small commonplace book, dated January 1664, there are several articles on angular sections, and the squaring of curves and "crooked lines that may be squared", several calculations about musical notes, geometrical propositions from François Viète and Frans van Schooten, annotations out of John Wallis's "Arithmetic of Infinities", together with observations on refraction, on the grinding of "spherical optic glasses", on the errors of lenses and the method of rectifying them, and on the extraction of all kinds of roots, particularly those "in affected powers".In this same book the following entry made by Newton himself, many years afterward, gives a further account of the nature of his work during the period when he was an undergraduate