About my name: Isaac Newton

I couldn't start this post without first explaining why I have this name. There isn't much logic to it: after my father chose “Isaac” for biblical reasons, my mother simply had the great idea of adding “Newton”.

Personally, I quite like being called this — so much so that I think about naming my children after other geniuses. Carrying a famous name has always been a way for people to break the ice with me, and an academic inspiration (I always got good grades in maths and physics; quite a responsibility).

I could tell countless stories where my name was a source of jokes or of pride for my teachers, but here are the best ones:

• Before studying Computer Engineering, I had enrolled at a physics university. When I went to cancel my registration, the person in charge said: “What is this? Isaac Newton is giving up on physics?”
• At university I studied and played football with a classmate named Albert Einstein… just imagine the number of jokes that were made; they wouldn't fit here.
• For some sensible reason, Facebook wouldn't let my profile be “Isaac Newton”, so it was “Newton Isaac”. As a joke, I posted publicly complaining and threatening Facebook with legal action. Many people commented and followed the saga, and in the end I sent my ID document to support so they would change my name. The result? It worked — and afterwards a few lawyer followers who heard about it came asking how I had managed to “recover” my name. I had to explain it was nothing but a big joke.
• Changing my name on Facebook was not a good idea: I started being added to lots of Messenger groups and getting calls from random people. In one of those groups, teenagers from England were solving school algebra problems and added me to ask for help. It was funny talking to them, chatting a bit about football and even helping them with the subject.

And finally, the funniest of all: on an inspired day, a long time ago, I decided to write a poetic sentence and post it on a Brazilian quotes site, O Pensador.

Be happy; turn human selfishness into the thirst to love your neighbour.

Over the years I began to notice it was being collected by crawlers and bots across the web, and started being published as authored by “Isaac Newton” — the one more famous than me — on many other pages, and consequently used by all sorts of people as a motivational quote for the most varied purposes, sometimes even next to a picture of old Newton himself.

To find all this, it was enough to search for the sentence in quotation marks and the results showed up. By the way, it's really fun to do that with your full name and see what the internet knows about you.

The peak of this whole story, and the reason I'm telling it, is that the sentence is also in a book. Which means I'm a writer with a short but successful career. Brilliant, isn't it?

It's interesting to think about what happened and to realise how dangerous the internet's power over information is: something I did years ago became a truth for some people. How many other pieces of fake news or misinformation are being created and will stay marked in history? Only time will tell.

To conclude, I hope I've shared a bit of what it's like to have a famous name and, hopefully, put a smile on the face of anyone who read this far. If you share it enough, it might reach the author of the book and I may finally get my well-deserved credit. : )