Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was an English philosopher who is regarded throughout the history of science. In addition to his invention of calculus and a modern theory of light and color that he stated in the 17th century. Newton worked with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and others into a new and powerful synthesis. 3 centuries later there combined works resulted in classical mechanics.

Sir Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas day 1642 in Woolsthorpe, a hamlet near Grantham in Lincolnshire. He was the son of an illiterate small land owner also by the name Isaac.

When Isaac was around the age of three Newton's mother Hanna placed her first born child with his grandmother n order to remarry and raise a second family with Barnabas Smith, a wealthy rector from nearby North Witham. When Hanna returned to Woolsthorp in 1653 after the death of her second husband, Newton was dismissed by his mother. Newton's childhood was anything but happy and through out his life he fell into an emotional state and fell into violent and vindictive attack against he friends.

With his mothers return Newton was taken out of school and had to be a par take in his birthright of being a farmer. However he failed at his calling and return to school at King's School at Grantham to prepare to attend Trinity College in Cambridge, where we could eventual learn in calling.

Cambridge was an amazing learning center; however the scientific revolution had not yet begun. Little research is known of Newton's formal studies as an undergraduate, but he likely received large amounts of information about Aristotle as well as other classical authors. In 1664 Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, examined Newtons understanding of Euclid and found it lacking. We now know that during his undergraduate years Newton was engrossed in his studies and privately mastered the works of René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, and other major figures of the scientific revolution. A series of extant notebooks shows that by 1664 Newton had begun to master Descartes' Géométrie and other forms of mathematics far in advance of Euclid's Elements. Barrow, himself a gifted mathematician, had yet to appreciate Newton's genius.

Trinity College of Cambridge University, but when the bubonic plague reached Cambridge in 1175, he returned to the relative safety of his home for two years. During the time he made probably the most famous of his discoveries, the law of gravity. However either because he regarded the theory as incomplete or plagiarized by his fellow colleagues, he did not tell anyone of his monumental achievement for almost 20 years. It was not until 1684, when Newton was discussing with Edmund Halley the leading astronomical problem of the day. Prompted by Halley, Newton published his theories in perhaps the most influential physics book ever written Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica what we would call today science. Usually known simply as Newton's Prinicipia. The ideas expressed in that work from the basis for what today is know as Newtonian mechanics. Three basic laws of motion, the law of gravity, and the calculus quantify virtually all of the complex dynamic behavior we are listed in the More Precisely.

The first law simply stated that