You're still not really addressing Jules's main point, which is that Da Vinci made no major contributions to math or science. To compare him to Newton is absurd, as any mathematician or physicist will tell you. A large portion of a first-year engineering curriculum is spent learning things that Newton discovered (that is, calculus and classical mechanics). I read through the wikipedia page you provided, and none of the scientific results even approach the significance Newton's work. I have no problem with his artistic work being appreciated, but I am always confused about why people seem to think his work in any other area was important.
Actually it would never have occurred to me to directly compare Newton and Da Vinci's specific works. If you will look back to the dawn of the thread, I was comparing Da Vinci to Steve Jobs; specifically their achievement in changing the nature of human thought.
(Just for the record, I'd give Da Vinci the edge in that comparison...)
Jules wanted to know why people thought Da Vinci was so great and posited that he was a mediocre artist, and that his science/engineering were bogus. Of course, in the modern sense, Da Vinci wasn't a scientist, and a very different kind of engineer. Galileo, Newton, et al. gave those areas of thought their modern sense.
Kepler wasn't a scientist in the modern sense either, but he was essential for the later astronomers to do what they did. If he hadn't done what he did then someone else would have had to.
You can throw out the Greeks and a most of the Islamic theorists by the same logic as you throw out Da Vinci's achievements. Or for that matter, throw out Newton, as he's clearly been superseded.
What a bunch of amateurs!
I'm not talking about current practice and theory. And I'm not talking about a popularity contest as to who's your favorite intellectual superhero or a video game where players are leveling up to higher planes. I'm talking about the history of human thought and its milestones. People in the past thought very differently than they do today, and I don't just mean that they believed different things. Da Vinci's approach to visualization and observation were singular and in advance of his times.
He was a bellwether of things to come. And that's why people hold him in high regard.
