Sir Isaac Newton
...
scientists in history. He made important
contributions to many fields of science. His
discoveries and theories laid the foundation for
much of the progress in science. Newton was one
of the inventors of a mathematics called calculus.
He also solved the mysteries of light and optics,
formulated the three laws of motion, and derived
from them the law of universal gravitation. Newton
was born on December 25, 1642, at
Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire.
When he was three years old, he was put in care
of his Grandmother. He then was sent to grammar
school in Grantham. Then later he attended Trinity
College at the University of Cambridge. Newton
ignored much of the established curriculum of the
university to pursue his own interests; mathematics
and natural philosophy. Proceeding entirely on his
own, he investigated the latest developments in
mathematics and the new natural philosophy that
treated nature as a complicated machine. Almost
immediately, still under the age of 25, he made
fundamental discoveries that were instrumental in
his career science. The Fluxional Method,
Newton's first achievement was in mathematics.
He generalized the methods that were being used
to draw tangents to curves and to calculate the
area swept by curves. He recognized that the two
procedures were inverse operations. By joining
them in what he called the fluxional method,
Newton developed in 1666 a kind of mathematics
that is known as calculus. Calculus was a new and
powerful method that carried modern mathematics
above the level of Greek geometry. Optics was
another area of Newton's early interests. In trying
to explain how colors occur, he...
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