On Tuesday, 5 February 2013
Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March
1726) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher,
alchemist and theologian who has been considered by many to be the greatest and
most influential scientist who ever lived. His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, laid the foundations for most of
classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and
the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical
universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motion of objects
on Earth and that of celestial bodies is governed by the same set of natural
laws: by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary
motion and his theory of gravitation he removed the last doubts about
heliocentrism and advanced the scientific revolution. The Principia is
generally considered to be one of the most important scientific books ever
written, both due to the specific physical laws the work successfully described,
and for its style, which assisted in setting standards for scientific
publication down to the present time.
Newton built the first practical reflecting
telescope and
developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes
white light into the many colours that form the visible spectrum. He also
formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In
mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the
development of differential and integral calculus. He generalised the binomial
theorem to non-integer exponents, developed Newton's method for approximating
the roots of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.
Although an unorthodox Christian, Newton was deeply
religious and his occult studies took up a substantial part of his life. He
secretly rejected Trinitarianism and refused holy orders. As Master of the Mint
he effectively placed Britain on its first Gold Standard.
