Isaac Newton

Life of Isaac Newton

Biographical Data

Born: December 25, 1642 in Woolsthorpe, England Professional life: until 1658 - School at Grantham 1661 - Left for Cambridge University 1665 - Forced to leave Cambridge in because of the plague 1666 - Stays in Woolsthorpe and begins to develop his most famous insights 1667 - Returned to Cambridge 1669 - Became a part of faculty Offered post of warden of the Mint in 1696 1670-1671 - Composed Methodis fluxionum - his main work on the calculus 1687 - Published first edition of Principia 1689-1690 and 1701-1702 - member of parliament for the university in 1703 - President of Royal Society Died: March 20, 1727, in London, England

Personal Life

Father died before Newton was born, mother left him when he was 3, grew up at grandmother's, puritanical upbringing; Introverted, insecure; Very protective of his privacy (only few manuscripts from his boyhood and undergraduate years); Incapable to accept other brilliant minds - e.g. campaign to destroy Leibnitz; Psychological problems - nervous breakdown in 1693: paranoia, depressions

Academic focus

Optics

"He denied the homogeneity of light, stating that it was complex and heterogeneous."

Gravity and Mechanics

Every 2 objects attract each other such as planet and the Sun, or Earth and the Moon, "attract each other with a force that depends on the porduct of heir masses and falls off the square of their distance apart."

3 laws of motion:

Mathematics

Fundamental work in the calculus; classical and analytic geometry; finite differences; classification of curves; methods of computation and approximation; probability

Secondary academic interests

Alchemy; Philosophy; Theology

Contribution to Calculus

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Concept of limit

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[Bibliography]

www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=40

www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/calc1/calc1.html

Dictionary of Scientific Biography; Charles Coulston Gillispie

Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, sec. Ed.; John Daintith, Sarah Mitchell, Elizabeth Tootill, Derek Gjertsen