Newton, Sir Isaac

b. 1642; d. 1727

English mathematician and scientist, born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterwoth, near Grantham, Lincolnshire, posthumous son of a farmer, Isaac Newton, and Hannah Ayscough. He was educated at the King's School, Grantham, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in June 1661, graduating in 1665. He had taught himself mathematics and astronomy by reading, among other books, Clavis mathematicae by William Oughtred, Schooten's Latin translation of Géometrie by René Descartes and Arithmetica infinitorum by John Wallis - all of them the most advanced texts of the time. After his graduation there was an outbreak of plague in Cambridge and he spent most of the next 18 months at Woolsthorpe. Later he wrote of this period: 'I was in the prime of my age for invention and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since.' During this time he formulated for the first time general rules for the Calculus (which he called the method of 'fluxions') and a method of representing functions by infinite series (including the general Binomial Theorem. He had also hit upon the idea of universal gravitation (when, by his own account, he saw an apple fall to the ground), and showed experimentally that white light is a collection of rays of light of different colours which are refracted by a prism by varying amounts. He published none of these discoveries but returned to Trinity College, where he was elected a fellow in 1667, and concentrated on further research in optics and astronomy.

In 1669 Isaac Barrow resigned as Lucasian Professor of mathematics (probably so that he would be eligible for election as Master of Trinity) and recommended Newton as his successor. Newton was duly elected. In 1668 Nicolaus Mercator had published his Logarithmothechnia which contained one result that duplicated Newton's researches on infinite series. Anxious to establish his priority, Newton wrote the essay, De analysi per æquationes infinitas (On analysis by equations unlimited in the number of their terms), in 1669 but did not publish it. He prepared in 1671 a complete account of his work on infinite series and calculus but no bookseller would take the financial risk of publishing it. The manuscript of De analysi was circulated to other mathematicians who were thereby alerted to Newton's originality. When, in 1672, Newton sent to the Royal Society a telescope he had designed, he was elected a fellow. He responded by sending the Society an account of his researches on the composition of white light which provoked a long controversy with the quarrelsome Robert Hooke.

In 1684, the astronomer, Edmund Halley, visited Newton and posed the problem of computing the shapes of planetary orbits. This spurred Newton to synthesise his research on mathematics, dynamics, and celestial mechanics to produce one of the most important books in the history of science, Philosphia naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical principles of natural philosophy - usually known as Principia), 1687. Principia includes Newton's three 'laws of motion', the law of universal gravitation, a proof that planets move in ellipses under a central force which is inversely proportional to the square of distance, a proof that the earth is flattened at the poles and much else of fundamental importance.

1n 1689 Newton was elected to represent the university in the Convention Parliament. In 1696 he was appointed Warden of the Mint and in 1700 Master of the Mint; he resigned his professorship in 1701. On 30 November 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society and was re-elected annually for the rest of his life. He was knighted in 1705 by Queen Anne. In 1704 he summarised his optical researches in Opticks which had two appendices on the calculus - the first time that Newton's discovery had appeared in print. Publication of Opticks provoked a discreditable feud with Leibniz, who published an (unsigned) review of it, in which he claimed that Newton had stolen the calculus methods that Leibniz had discovered independently and published in 1684. In turn, Newton (with equal injustice) accused Leibniz of plagiarising the Principia in an article published by Leibniz in 1689. Eventually Leibniz appealed to the Royal Society to adjudicate the question of priority. Newton as president appointed the committee which reported in 1712 in favour of Newton.

Since discovered manuscripts show that Newton wrote the report. At the end of his life Newton is reported to have said, 'I do not know what I may appear to the world but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself on now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me'.

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