Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton, born 4 January 1643, was an English physicist, mathematician, natural philosopher, alchemist and astronomer. He publicized the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, which revolutionized the scientific community. Newton made numerous contributions to science during his life time.
Newton’s three laws of motion form the basis for classical mechanics. They help describe the relationships between acting forces and resulting motion. The first law states that every object remains at rest or in uniform motion unless it is acted upon by an external force. The second law states that an object of mass being subject to a force will undergo an acceleration that has the same direction as the force. Finally, the third law states that for every force an object exerts on another there is an equal and opposite force applied to that object, this is sometimes called the action-reaction law. Newton also created the law of Universal Gravitation; this states that every massive object in the universe attract every other massive object with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Between his three laws of motion and his universal gravitation law, Newton showed that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. This demonstrated the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his own laws, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism.
Newton built the first successful reflecting telescope in 1668, called the Newtonian telescope. It is one of the simplest and least expensive designs for the given size of its objective, and even still today is very popular with amateur astronomers for their home. He also developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colors that form the color spectrum. Today this is used for discovering what elements are present in celestial bodies based on their light. In addition, he also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.
In mathematics, Newton helped Gottfried Leibniz with the development of differential and integral calculus. Newton sought to remove the use of infinitesimals from his fluxional calculus because these quantities were thought of as un-rigorous and were fiercely criticized by many authors. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem which describes the algebraic expansion of powers of a binomial. This theorem led to the creation of Pascal’s triangle. He then developed Newton’s method for approximating the roots of a function with great accuracy. Finally, he made great contribution to the study of power series.
Newton died on the 31st of March in 1727. French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange often said that he was the greatest genius that ever lived. Though, during his life, Newton was rather modest of his own achievements, famously stating the quote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. Newton still remains influential to scientists today, and has made a great overall contribution to science and the world in general.
