Isaac Newton

A great scientist of the past

Sir Isaac Newton is considered as one of the greatest figures in the history of science. The Englishman was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher and alchemist, and made many contributions to the advancement of science.

Newton was recorded as having been born on January 4, 1643, according to the modern calendar. (At the time of his birth, England had not adopted the latest papal calendar and therefore, his date of birth was recorded as Christmas Day 1642.)

He was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire, three months after his father, also called Isaac, died. He was born prematurely, and was a small child.

His mother, Hannah Ayscough, remarried when the boy was three years old, and went to live with her new husband, leaving her son in the care of her mother, Margery Ayscough. The young Newton disliked his stepfather and had some anger towards his mother for marrying him.

Newton started attending the village school and was later sent to King's School, Grantham, where he became the top student (his signature can still be seen on a window sill of the school library). He was then staying with the local apothecary, William Clarke and fell in love with Clarke's stepdaughter, Anne Storey.

The 19-year-old Newton had then gone on to Cambridge University, and their romance had cooled off; Newton never married.

At Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied, the teachings were based on the ideas of Aristotle, but Newton preferred the more advanced ideas of modern philosophers and astronomers. He discovered the generalised binomial theorem in 1665, and started working on a mathematical theory that would later become calculus.

The Great Plague caused the university to close down temporarily, soon after Newton had obtained his degree. During this period, Newton worked at home developing ideas such as calculus, optics and the law of gravitation.

Although Newton and Gottfried Leibniz had developed calculus independently (in fact, Newton had developed his method years before Leibniz), he started publishing it only in 1693, and gave a full account of his theory only in 1704.

Meanwhile, Leibniz had published a full account of his work in 1684. Some of the discoveries he is credited with are Newton's identities, Newton's method and classified cubic plane curves; he made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences, and was the first to use fractional indices and to employ coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations. He also discovered a new formula for the mathematical number known as pi.

In 1669, Newton was elected Lucasian professor of mathematics. Although any Fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be ordained as an Anglican priest at that time (they didn't need to be active in the church), Newton was exempted from this.

Newton experimented and lectured on optics between 1670 and 1672. This included an investigation on the refraction(bending) of light; he demonstrated that a prism could break down white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could again make the multicoloured spectrum into white light.

After many experiments, Newton decided that a refracting telescope would be affected by the dispersion of light into colours, and invented a reflecting telescope (today known as a Newtonian telescope) as a solution.

The Royal Society expressed interest in learning more about this telescope, which encouraged him to publish his notes On Colour, which he later expanded into a publication called Opticks.

His most important contribution is the discovery of gravity. It's said that Newton formulated his theory of universal gravitation after watching an apple fall from a tree.

The great scientist was also responsible for a large number of religious literature in the 1690s; he also placed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at April 3, AD 33, which is now accepted to be correct.

He also devoted a lot of time to alchemy (early form of chemistry) and was a member of the British Parliament from 1689 to 1690 and in 1701. In 1696, he was appointed the warden of the Royal Mint (where coins are made), which post he held until his death.

He became one of the best known masters of the Mint, being responsible for reforms which added considerably to the wealth and stability of England. Queen Anne bestowed a knighthood on him in 1705 for his work at the Mint.

Newton was made President of the Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the French Academie des Sciences. He died in London on March 20 (31 according to calendar variations), 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

It was revealed after his death that his body contained large amounts of mercury, which may have been a result of his alchemy experiments.

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Newton's laws of motion

The famous three laws of motion:

* Newton's First Law (Law of Inertia) - An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform motion unless acted upon by a net external force.

* Newton's Second Law - A force applied on an object equals the time rate of change of its momentum.

* Newton's Third Law - Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

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Writings by Newton

* Method of Fluxions (1671)

* Of Nature's Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation (1671-75)

* Unpublished work on alchemy

* De Motu Corporum in Gyrum (1684)

* Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)

* Opticks (1704)

* Reports as Master of the Mint (1701-25)

* Arithmetica Universalis (1707)

* Short Chronicle, The System of the World, Optical Lectures, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, Amended and De mundi systemate were published posthumously (after his death) in 1728.

* An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture (1754).