Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642 in the small English town of, Lincolnshire. He is without a doubt one of the most notable and influential figures of the 17th century. He was a remarkable physicist and mathematician and with little argument one could say he was the face of the scientific revolution in the 17th century. Isaac Newton discovered the three laws of motion which slowly turned into the building blocks of today’s physics. In our view and focus however he is the most commonly noted figure for the development and implication of calculus.
In December of 1642 a local yeoman, or a man that owns his own farm, had a small and unhealthy baby named Isaac Newton and the doctors condemned young Isaac to not make it to his first birthday. Despite the doctors diagnosis Isaac ended up making it through his first birthday and 83 more of them. Isaac Newton lost his father three months before his birth but soon after his birth his mother abandoned him for a young minister named Barnabas Smith. Smith then sent young Isaac to live with his grandmother. It is unknown if Isaac would ever see his mother for at least nine years after that, but throughout his life he reports psychological and insecurity issues from the abandonment of his mother for the rest of his life. However after paying no attention to Isaac Newton, she then willed all of her property to him after her second husband died. At a young age Newton was managing property and watching livestock. However when Isaac was out in the fields watching his cattle he would eventually curl up under tree and just read a book, which led to him being a sub-par cattle farmer. Some say this is where the idea for gravity came from when he was sitting under an apple tree and an apple fell to the ground. But where his ideas stemmed from nobody truly knows.
He enrolled in a university where in 1665 he received his bachelors, and surprisingly the most distinguished graduate of the college throughout their entire history, went relatively unnoticed. After graduating he returned home and created his own innovative ways of theory, philosophy and solving mathematics. Around this time however the plague had shut down the university and most of England for about two years, but during this time he laid the foundations of calculus. Within these foundation of calculus he examined circular motion, or motion of the planets, but more importantly he solved the inverse square relation of the planets and the sun, that was based off his own philosophy of calculus. Not only did Newton invent calculus he applied it to something that was centuries before his time and literally light-years away.
After simply creating calculus independently in his house, he did not publish it. He decided to work on other ideas that interested him such as optics. When the plague approached it’s tail end and university’s started opening back up, Newton decided to become a professor. Trinity College offered him a position as a professor and whether they simply hired him for mathematics or physics or his ideas on lenses nobody knows. But he was always passionate about lenses so he decided to pick optics. After teaching the course for two to three years he decided to developed the essay Of Colours which simply went into deeper understanding of Kepler’s, ideas of refraction and even some of the philosophy of Descartes. To say the least any impressions made from his essay’s were never noted in newspapers or talked about at a later date.
Even though this was disappointing to Isaac Newton, he pressed on and perfected his work on mathematics which was called the Philosophe Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or in today’s modern English we would say the Principles of Planetary Motion. During the creation of the book Hooke and many other physicists contacted Newton but he disregarded there letters and never responded. Historians look at this in two different ways; one way being Newton used others ideas and simply rearranged thoughts and published them as his own, or the more commonly accepted idea of he disagreed with what others said most of the time but didn’t want to tell them why and jeopardize his autonomous claims of science. Why he did not respond to letters is not very important when you look at the whole picture however, because most of his claims where so far ahead of what any other physicist was even trying to prove. Even though in 1680 physicists were claiming some of his work was plagiarized, it is a common belief that some of the information may have been sent to him by others but that still does not account for the fact that he explained his theories using mathematics he created, therefore making some of their claims useless because they could not know the mathematics to back up most of their propositions or theories.
The life of Isaac Newton can be spread over thousands of pages of any encyclopedia or webpage, but the purpose of this shorted biography was to show and examine Newton’s influence on the field of mathematics and how he led up to his independent discoveries calculus.
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