Who is sir isaac newton

Barton was the mistress of Lord Halifax, a high-ranking government official who was instrumental in having Newton promoted, in , to master of the Mint—a position that he would hold until his death. Not wanting it to be considered a mere honorary position, Newton approached the job in earnest, reforming the currency and severely punishing counterfeiters.

As master of the Mint, Newton moved the British currency, the pound sterling, from the silver to the gold standard. However, Newton never seemed to understand the notion of science as a cooperative venture, and his ambition and fierce defense of his own discoveries continued to lead him from one conflict to another with other scientists. By most accounts, Newton's tenure at the society was tyrannical and autocratic; he was able to control the lives and careers of younger scientists with absolute power.

In , in a controversy that had been brewing for several years, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz publicly accused Newton of plagiarizing his research, claiming he had discovered infinitesimal calculus several years before the publication of Principia. In , the Royal Society appointed a committee to investigate the matter. Of course, since Newton was president of the society, he was able to appoint the committee's members and oversee its investigation.

Not surprisingly, the committee concluded Newton's priority over the discovery. That same year, in another of Newton's more flagrant episodes of tyranny, he published without permission the notes of astronomer John Flamsteed. It seems the astronomer had collected a massive body of data from his years at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England.

Newton had requested a large volume of Flamsteed's notes for his revisions to Principia. Annoyed when Flamsteed wouldn't provide him with more information as quickly as he wanted it, Newton used his influence as president of the Royal Society to be named the chairman of the body of "visitors" responsible for the Royal Observatory.

He then tried to force the immediate publication of Flamsteed's catalogue of the stars, as well as all of Flamsteed's notes, edited and unedited. To add insult to injury, Newton arranged for Flamsteed's mortal enemy, Edmund Halley, to prepare the notes for press. Flamsteed was finally able to get a court order forcing Newton to cease his plans for publication and return the notes—one of the few times that Newton was bested by one of his rivals.

By this time, Newton had become one of the most famous men in Europe. His scientific discoveries were unchallenged. He also had become wealthy, investing his sizable income wisely and bestowing sizable gifts to charity. Despite his fame, Newton's life was far from perfect: He never married or made many friends, and in his later years, a combination of pride, insecurity and side trips on peculiar scientific inquiries led even some of his few friends to worry about his mental stability.

By the time he reached 80 years of age, Newton was experiencing digestion problems and had to drastically change his diet and mobility. In March , Newton experienced severe pain in his abdomen and blacked out, never to regain consciousness. He died the next day, on March 31, , at the age of Newton's fame grew even more after his death, as many of his contemporaries proclaimed him the greatest genius who ever lived. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but his discoveries had a large impact on Western thought, leading to comparisons to the likes of Plato , Aristotle and Galileo.

Although his discoveries were among many made during the Scientific Revolution, Newton's universal principles of gravity found no parallels in science at the time. Of course, Newton was proven wrong on some of his key assumptions. In the 20th century, Albert Einstein would overturn Newton's concept of the universe, stating that space, distance and motion were not absolute but relative and that the universe was more fantastic than Newton had ever conceived.

Newton might not have been surprised: In his later life, when asked for an assessment of his achievements, he replied, "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 now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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See More. There is no doubt that Isaac felt very bitter towards his mother and his step-father Barnabas Smith.

When examining his sins at age nineteen, Isaac listed:- Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them. Upon the death of his stepfather in , Newton lived in an extended family consisting of his mother, his grandmother, one half-brother, and two half-sisters. Although this was only five miles from his home, Isaac lodged with the Clark family at Grantham.

However he seems to have shown little promise in academic work. His school reports described him as 'idle' and 'inattentive'. His mother, by now a lady of reasonable wealth and property, thought that her eldest son was the right person to manage her affairs and her estate. Isaac was taken away from school but soon showed that he had no talent, or interest, in managing an estate.

An uncle, William Ayscough, decided that Isaac should prepare for entering university and, having persuaded his mother that this was the right thing to do, Isaac was allowed to return to the Free Grammar School in Grantham in to complete his school education. This time he lodged with Stokes, who was the headmaster of the school, and it would appear that, despite suggestions that he had previously shown no academic promise, Isaac must have convinced some of those around him that he had academic promise.

Some evidence points to Stokes also persuading Isaac's mother to let him enter university, so it is likely that Isaac had shown more promise in his first spell at the school than the school reports suggest. Another piece of evidence comes from Isaac's list of sins referred to above. He lists one of his sins as We know nothing about what Isaac learnt in preparation for university, but Stokes was an able man and almost certainly gave Isaac private coaching and a good grounding.

There is no evidence that he learnt any mathematics, but we cannot rule out Stokes introducing him to Euclid 's Elements which he was well capable of teaching although there is evidence mentioned below that Newton did not read Euclid before Anecdotes abound about a mechanical ability which Isaac displayed at the school and stories are told of his skill in making models of machines, in particular of clocks and windmills.

However, when biographers seek information about famous people there is always a tendency for people to report what they think is expected of them, and these anecdotes may simply be made up later by those who felt that the most famous scientist in the world ought to have had these skills at school.

He was older than most of his fellow students but, despite the fact that his mother was financially well off, he entered as a sizar. A sizar at Cambridge was a student who received an allowance toward college expenses in exchange for acting as a servant to other students. There is certainly some ambiguity in his position as a sizar, for he seems to have associated with "better class" students rather than other sizars.

Westfall see [ 23 ] or [ 24 ] has suggested that Newton may have had Humphrey Babington, a distant relative who was a Fellow of Trinity, as his patron. This reasonable explanation would fit well with what is known and mean that his mother did not subject him unnecessarily to hardship as some of his biographers claim.

Newton's aim at Cambridge was a law degree. Instruction at Cambridge was dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle but some freedom of study was allowed in the third year of the course. Newton studied the philosophy of Descartes , Gassendi , Hobbes , and in particular Boyle.

The mechanics of the Copernican astronomy of Galileo attracted him and he also studied Kepler 's Optics. It is a fascinating account of how Newton's ideas were already forming around He headed the text with a Latin statement meaning " Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth" showing himself a free thinker from an early stage. How Newton was introduced to the most advanced mathematical texts of his day is slightly less clear. According to de Moivre , Newton's interest in mathematics began in the autumn of when he bought an astrology book at a fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in it.

Attempting to read a trigonometry book, he found that he lacked knowledge of geometry and so decided to read Barrow 's edition of Euclid 's Elements. The first few results were so easy that he almost gave up but he Returning to the beginning, Newton read the whole book with a new respect.

Newton also studied Wallis 's Algebra and it appears that his first original mathematical work came from his study of this text.

He read Wallis 's method for finding a square of equal area to a parabola and a hyperbola which used indivisibles. Newton made notes on Wallis 's treatment of series but also devised his own proofs of the theorems writing:- Thus Wallis doth it, but it may be done thus It would be easy to think that Newton's talent began to emerge on the arrival of Barrow to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge in when he became a Fellow at Trinity College. Certainly the date matches the beginnings of Newton's deep mathematical studies.

However, it would appear that the date is merely a coincidence and that it was only some years later that Barrow recognised the mathematical genius among his students.

Despite some evidence that his progress had not been particularly good, Newton was elected a scholar on 28 April and received his bachelor's degree in April It would appear that his scientific genius had still not emerged, but it did so suddenly when the plague closed the University in the summer of and he had to return to Lincolnshire. There, in a period of less than two years, while Newton was still under 25 years old, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy.

While Newton remained at home he laid the foundations for differential and integral calculus, several years before its independent discovery by Leibniz. The 'method of fluxions', as he termed it, was based on his crucial insight that the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure to differentiating it.

Taking differentiation as the basic operation, Newton produced simple analytical methods that unified many separate techniques previously developed to solve apparently unrelated problems such as finding areas, tangents , the lengths of curves and the maxima and minima of functions. When the University of Cambridge reopened after the plague in , Newton put himself forward as a candidate for a fellowship.

In October he was elected to a minor fellowship at Trinity College but, after being awarded his Master's Degree, he was elected to a major fellowship in July which allowed him to dine at the Fellows' Table.

In July Barrow tried to ensure that Newton's mathematical achievements became known to the world. He sent Newton's text De Analysi to Collins in London writing:- [ Newton ] brought me the other day some papers, wherein he set down methods of calculating the dimensions of magnitudes like that of Mr Mercator concerning the hyperbola, but very general; as also of resolving equations; which I suppose will please you; and I shall send you them by the next.

Collins corresponded with all the leading mathematicians of the day so Barrow 's action should have led to quick recognition.

Collins showed Brouncker , the President of the Royal Society , Newton's results with the author's permission but after this Newton requested that his manuscript be returned. Collins could not give a detailed account but de Sluze and Gregory learnt something of Newton's work through Collins. Barrow resigned the Lucasian chair in to devote himself to divinity, recommending that Newton still only 27 years old be appointed in his place. Shortly after this Newton visited London and twice met with Collins but, as he wrote to Gregory Newton's first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics and this was the topic of his first lecture course begun in January He had reached the conclusion during the two plague years that white light is not a simple entity.

Every scientist since Aristotle had believed that white light was a basic single entity, but the chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced Newton otherwise.

When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism Newton noted the spectrum of colours that was formed. He argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays which are refracted at slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray produces a different spectral colour.

Newton was led by this reasoning to the erroneous conclusion that telescopes using refracting lenses would always suffer chromatic aberration.

He therefore proposed and constructed a reflecting telescope. In Newton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society after donating a reflecting telescope.

Also in Newton published his first scientific paper on light and colour in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The paper was generally well received but Hooke and Huygens objected to Newton's attempt to prove, by experiment alone, that light consists of the motion of small particles rather than waves.

The reception that his publication received did nothing to improve Newton's attitude to making his results known to the world. He was always pulled in two directions, there was something in his nature which wanted fame and recognition yet another side of him feared criticism and the easiest way to avoid being criticised was to publish nothing. Certainly one could say that his reaction to criticism was irrational, and certainly his aim to humiliate Hooke in public because of his opinions was abnormal.

However, perhaps because of Newton's already high reputation, his corpuscular theory reigned until the wave theory was revived in the 19 th century. Newton's relations with Hooke deteriorated further when, in , Hooke claimed that Newton had stolen some of his optical results.

Although the two men made their peace with an exchange of polite letters, Newton turned in on himself and away from the Royal Society which he associated with Hooke as one of its leaders. He delayed the publication of a full account of his optical researches until after the death of Hooke in Newton's Opticks appeared in It dealt with the theory of light and colour and with investigations of the colours of thin sheets 'Newton's rings' and diffraction of light. To explain some of his observations he had to use a wave theory of light in conjunction with his corpuscular theory.

His mother died in the following year and he withdrew further into his shell, mixing as little as possible with people for a number of years. Newton's life naturally divides into four parts: the years before he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in ; his years in Cambridge before the Principia was published in ; a period of almost a decade immediately following this publication, marked by the renown it brought him and his increasing disenchantment with Cambridge; and his final three decades in London, for most of which he was Master of the Mint.

While he remained intellectually active during his years in London, his legendary advances date almost entirely from his years in Cambridge. Nevertheless, save for his optical papers of the early s and the first edition of the Principia , all his works published before he died fell within his years in London. Newton was born into a Puritan family in Woolsthorpe, a small village in Linconshire near Grantham, on 25 December old calendar , a few days short of one year after Galileo died.

Isaac's father, a farmer, died two months before Isaac was born. When his mother Hannah married the 63 year old Barnabas Smith three years later and moved to her new husband's residence, Isaac was left behind with his maternal grandparents. Isaac learned to read and write from his maternal grandmother and mother, both of whom, unlike his father, were literate.

Hannah returned to Woolsthorpe with three new children in , after Smith died. Two years later Isaac went to boarding school in Grantham, returning full time to manage the farm, not very successfully, in Hannah's brother, who had received an M. After further schooling at Grantham, he entered Trinity College in , somewhat older than most of his classmates.

These years of Newton's youth were the most turbulent in the history of England. The English Civil War had begun in , King Charles was beheaded in , Oliver Cromwell ruled as lord protector from until he died in , followed by his son Richard from to , leading to the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in How much the political turmoil of these years affected Newton and his family is unclear, but the effect on Cambridge and other universities was substantial, if only through unshackling them for a period from the control of the Anglican Catholic Church.

The return of this control with the restoration was a key factor inducing such figures as Robert Boyle to turn to Charles II for support for what in emerged as the Royal Society of London. The intellectual world of England at the time Newton matriculated to Cambridge was thus very different from what it was when he was born. Newton's initial education at Cambridge was classical, focusing primarily through secondary sources on Aristotlean rhetoric, logic, ethics, and physics.

By , Newton had begun reaching beyond the standard curriculum, reading, for example, the Latin edition of Descartes's Opera philosophica , which included the Meditations , Discourse on Method , the Dioptrics , and the Principles of Philosophy. Newton spent all but three months from the summer of until the spring of at home in Woolsthorpe when the university was closed because of the plague. This period was his so-called annus mirabilis.

During it, he made his initial experimental discoveries in optics and developed independently of Huygens's treatment of the mathematical theory of uniform circular motion, in the process noting the relationship between the inverse-square and Kepler's rule relating the square of the planetary periods to the cube of their mean distance from the Sun.

Even more impressively, by late he had become de facto the leading mathematician in the world, having extended his earlier examination of cutting-edge problems into the discovery of the calculus, as presented in his tract of October On the basis of this tract Isaac Barrow recommended Newton as his replacement as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position he assumed in October , four and a half years after he had received his Bachelor of Arts.

Over the course of the next fifteen years as Lucasian Professor Newton presented his lectures and carried on research in a variety of areas. By he had completed most of a treatise length account of the calculus, [ 2 ] which he then found no one would publish. This failure appears to have diverted his interest in mathematics away from the calculus for some time, for the mathematical lectures he registered during this period mostly concern algebra. During the early s he undertook a critical review of classical texts in geometry, a review that reduced his view of the importance of symbolic mathematics.

His lectures from to concerned optics, with a large range of experiments presented in detail. Newton went public with his work in optics in early , submitting material that was read before the Royal Society and then published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This led to four years of exchanges with various figures who challenged his claims, including both Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens — exchanges that at times exasperated Newton to the point that he chose to withdraw from further public exchanges in natural philosophy.

So, though they remained unpublished, Newton's advances in mathematics scarcely remained a secret. This period as Lucasian Professor also marked the beginning of his more private researches in alchemy and theology. Newton purchased chemical apparatus and treatises in alchemy in , with experiments in chemistry extending across this entire period. The issue of the vows Newton might have to take in conjunction with the Lucasian Professorship also appears to have precipitated his study of the doctrine of the Trinity, which opened the way to his questioning the validity of a good deal more doctrine central to the Roman and Anglican Churches.

Newton showed little interest in orbital astronomy during this period until Hooke initiated a brief correspondence with him in an effort to solicit material for the Royal Society at the end of November , shortly after Newton had returned to Cambridge following the death of his mother.

Among the several problems Hooke proposed to Newton was the question of the trajectory of a body under an inverse-square central force:. Newton apparently discovered the systematic relationship between conic-section trajectories and inverse-square central forces at the time, but did not communicate it to anyone, and for reasons that remain unclear did not follow up this discovery until Halley, during a visit in the summer of , put the same question to him.

His immediate answer was, an ellipse; and when he was unable to produce the paper on which he had made this determination, he agreed to forward an account to Halley in London. The body of this tract consists of ten deduced propositions — three theorems and seven problems — all of which, along with their corollaries, recur in important propositions in the Principia.

Save for a few weeks away from Cambridge, from late until early , Newton concentrated on lines of research that expanded the short ten-proposition tract into the page Principia , with its derived propositions. Initially the work was to have a two book structure, but Newton subsequently shifted to three books, and replaced the original version of the final book with one more mathematically demanding.

The manuscript for Book 1 was sent to London in the spring of , and the manuscripts for Books 2 and 3, in March and April , respectively. The roughly three hundred copies of the Principia came off the press in the summer of , thrusting the 44 year old Newton into the forefront of natural philosophy and forever ending his life of comparative isolation. The years between the publication of the Principia and Newton's permanent move to London in were marked by his increasing disenchantment with his situation in Cambridge.

In January , following the Glorious Revolution at the end of , he was elected to represent Cambridge University in the Convention Parliament, which he did until January During this time he formed friendships with John Locke and Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and in the summer of he finally met Christiaan Huygens face to face for two extended discussions.

Perhaps because of disappointment with Huygens not being convinced by the argument for universal gravity, in the early s Newton initiated a radical rewriting of the Principia.

During these same years he wrote but withheld his principal treatise in alchemy, Praxis ; he corresponded with Richard Bentley on religion and allowed Locke to read some of his writings on the subject; he once again entered into an effort to put his work on the calculus in a form suitable for publication; and he carried out experiments on diffraction with the intent of completing his Opticks , only to withhold the manuscript from publication because of dissatisfaction with its treatment of diffraction.

The radical revision of the Principia became abandoned by , during the middle of which Newton suffered, by his own testimony, what in more recent times would be called a nervous breakdown. In the two years following his recovery that autumn, he continued his experiments in chymistry and he put substantial effort into trying to refine and extend the gravity-based theory of the lunar orbit in the Principia , but with less success than he had hoped.