Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, near Grantham, on December 25, 1642. His education took place at Trinity College, in Cambridge where he lived from 1661 to 1696. Here is where he studied physics and astronomy, and created calculus.

Newton became interested in mathematics in the autumn of 1663 when he tried to read an astrology book but could not understand it because he had little knowledge of trigonometry and geometry. What got his mind going was when he read that parallelograms upon the same base and between the same parallels are equal. He then returned back to the astronomy book with a greater understanding and interest.

In the summer of 1665, the plague closed down the University he was attending and during the next two years, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy. During this time he laid the foundations for differntial and integral calculus. He understood that the integrations of a function is merely the inverse procedure to differentiating it, taking differentiation as a basic operation, he produced simple analytical methods that unified many separate techniques previously developed to solve apparently unrelated problems such as areas, tangents, the lengths of curves and the maxima and minima of functions. In his writing, he set down methods of calculating the dimensions of magnitudes concerning hyperbolas.

In 1669 Newton was appointed the Lucasian Chair after Collins barrow resigned his job. Newton's first work was on optics and was the topic of his first lecture. In his research, he reached the conclusion that light is not a simple entity. Before his time, people had believed that white light was a basic single entity, but the chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced him otherwise. With this hypothesis, he wrongly concluded that telescopes using refracting lenses would always suffer chromatic aberration; therefore he constructed a reflecting telescope. He delayed the publication of a full account of his optical researches until 1704, it dealt with: investigations of the colors of thin sheets, Newton's rings, and diffraction of light.

However Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which climaxed with the theory of universal gravitation. By 1966, he had