Sir ………………………, FRS (4 January1643 – 31 March1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history. ……………………… wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism.
Among other scientific discoveries, ……………………… realised that the spectrum of colours observed when whitelight passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles. He also developed a law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air. He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars. Despite this renown in mainstream science, Newton spent much of his time working on alchemy rather than physics, writing considerably more papers on the former than the latter.
……………………… played a major role in the development of calculus, famously sharing credit with Gottfried Leibniz. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example the generalised binomial theorem. The mathematician and mathematical physicist Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), said that "……………………… was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish." |