Isaac Newton
1643–1727 2 entries
Biography
Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist and astronomer, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Born in Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and during the plague years of 1665 and 1666, back home in the country, he made the first of his great discoveries. He developed calculus, at about the same time as Leibniz, and showed with a prism that white light is made up of all the colours. He also built the first practical reflecting telescope.
In 1687 he published the Principia, in which he set out the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, explaining with one theory both the fall of an apple and the orbits of the planets. Later in life he became Warden and then Master of the Royal Mint and president of the Royal Society, and in 1705 he was knighted. He died in London in 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
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