Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton (1642–1726) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and author whose formulation of the laws of motion and universal gravitation (published in his 1687 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or Principia) unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics under a single mathematical framework and established the paradigm of mathematical physics that dominated natural science through the nineteenth century. Born prematurely in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, to a yeoman family, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661; during the Cambridge plague of 1665–1666, when the university closed, he retired to Woolsthorpe and conducted intensive investigations in optics, mathematics, and astronomy, discoveries he later termed his annus mirabilis period. His optical experiments with prisms (particularly his demonstration that white light is composed of rays of heterogeneous refrangibility) challenged prevailing Cartesian and Aristotelian theories of light; his mathematical innovations—including the development of differential and integral calculus (circa 1665–1666)—provided the instrumental means to express physical laws with unprecedented precision. The Principia synthesized decades of work and presented three fundamental laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation (F = Gm₁m₂/r²), and mathematical proofs derived from these axioms; it demonstrated that gravitational attraction between all material bodies follows an inverse-square law and that this single principle accounts for terrestrial gravity, planetary orbits, lunar tides, and the precession of the equinoxes. His later career included service as Master of the Royal Mint (1699–1727) and President of the Royal Society (1703–1727), consolidated his status as the preeminent natural philosopher of his age.