I.+Isaac+Newton



Sir Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643 in Woolsthorpe, a hamlet near Grantham in Lincolnshire. When he was barely three years old Newton's mother, Hanna, placed her first born with his grandmother in order to remarry and raise a second family. Newton was denied his mother's attention, a possible clue to his complex character. His childhood was anything but happy, and throughout his life he verged on emotional collapse, occasionally falling into violent and vindictive attacks against friend and foe alike. Newton was thrown into the life of a farmer but, he failed miserabley and found instead found his calling at Cambridge University. Here Newton entered a new world, one he eventually called his own (Hatch 1).

Isaac Newton is known as making great scientific strides that changed mankind’s way of thinking about how the world works. Newton’s Laws of Motion became the founding principle of mechanics and enlightened the masses about the relationships between force and motion. He published his works in the ‘Philosophieae Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ in 1687. Newton also was the discoverer of gravity. His theory led to the calculation of the orbital period of the Moon. By establishing the close relationship between the Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his gravitational theory, Newton proclaimed that the same natural laws are responsible for the motion of both the Earth and other celestial bodies. Isaac Newton invented the generalized binomial theorem and started working on the development of a mathematical theory, which went on to become the very important branch of Calculus. He also devised a new formula to calculate Pi. Newton was the discoverer of the visible light spectrum by shining light into a prism and is the inventor of the reflecting telescope. All in all, Sir Isaac Newton lived a busy life filled with creating ground-breaking laws of nature and inventing tools and systems that are still used today in our daily lives. (Buzzle.com: Achievements of Isaac Newton)