Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac
Newton PRS MP (/ˈnjuːtən/;[8] 25 December
1642 – 20 March 1726/7[1]) was an English physicist and mathematician(described in
his own day as a "natural philosopher")
who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time
and as a key figure in the scientific
revolution. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first published in 1687, laid the
foundations for classical
mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to opticsand shares credit
with Gottfried
Leibniz for the invention of calculus.
Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which dominated
scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. By
deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from his
mathematical description of gravity, and then using the same principles to
account for the trajectories of comets, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes,
and other phenomena, Newton removed the last doubts about the validity of the heliocentric model of
the cosmos. This work also demonstrated that themotion of
objects on Earth and of celestial bodies
could be described by the same principles. His prediction that the Earth should
be shaped as an oblate
spheroid was later vindicated by the measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine,
and others, which helped convince most Continental
European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics
over the earlier system of Descartes.
Newton also built the first practical reflecting
telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the
observation that a prismdecomposes
white light into the many colours of the visible spectrum. He
formulated an empirical law
of cooling, studied the speed of sound, and
introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In
addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the
study of power series,
generalised the binomial
theorem to non-integer exponents, developed Newton's method for
approximating the roots of a
function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves.
Newton was a fellow of Trinity
College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at
the University of
Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian and, unusually
for a member of the Cambridge faculty of the day, he refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, perhaps
because he privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Beyond his work
on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of biblical
chronology and alchemy, but most of his
work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. In his
later life, Newton became president of the Royal Society. He also
served the British government as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint.
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