C. Northcote Parkinson moved to the Isle of Man. After two years there, they moved to Canterbury, Kent, where he died in March 1993, at the age of 83. He was buried in Canterbury, and the law named after him is quoted as his epitaph. C. Northcote Parkinson Cyril Northcote Parkinson (30 July 1909 – 9 March 1993) was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller "Parkinson's Law" (1957), in which Parkinson advanced Parkinson's law, stating that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", an insight which
Maupertuis's principle applied the principle only to light, not matter (see ). He arrived at the principle by considering Snell's law for the refraction of light, which Fermat had explained by Fermat's principle, that light follows the path of shortest "time", not distance. This troubled Maupertuis, since he felt that time and distance should be on an equal footing: "why should light prefer the path of shortest time over that of distance?" Accordingly, Maupertuis asserts with no further justification the principle of least action as equivalent but more fundamental than Fermat's principle, and uses it to derive Snell's law. Maupertuis specifically states