Isaac newton family

English polymath (–)

For other uses, see Isaac Newton (disambiguation).

Sir Isaac Newton FRS
Portrait of Newton at 46,
Born	()4 January [O.S. 25 December ][a] Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England
Died	31 March () (aged&#;84) [O.S. 20 March ][a] Kensington, Middlesex, England
Resting place	Westminster Abbey
Education	Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, ; MA, )[4]
Known&#;for
Political party	Whig
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Academic advisors
Notable students
In office –
Preceded by	Robert Brady
Succeeded by	Edward Finch
In office –
Preceded by	Anthony Hammond
Succeeded by	Arthur Annesley, 5th Earl of Anglesey
In office –
Preceded by	John Somers
Succeeded by	Hans Sloane
In office –
–	Warden of the Mint
Preceded by	Thomas Neale
Succeeded by	John Conduitt
In office –
Preceded by	Isaac Barrow
Succeeded by	William Whiston

Sir Isaac Newton (25 December &#;– 20 March /27^[a]) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher.^[5] Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed.^[6] Newton's book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in , achieved the first great unification in physics and established classical mechanics.^[7][8] Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for formulating infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz.^[9] He contributed to and refined the scientific method, and his work is considered the most influential in bringing forth modern science.^{[11][12][13][15]}

In the Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint for centuries until it was superseded by the theory of relativity.

He used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating doubt about the Solar System's heliocentricity.^[16] Newton solved the two-body problem, and introduced the three-body problem.^[17] He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles.

Newton's inference that the Earth is an oblate spheroid was later confirmed by the geodetic measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, thereby convincing most European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over earlier systems.

Sir isaac newton facts biography Isaac Newton (born December 25, [January 4, , New Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England—died March 20 [March 31], , London) was an English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.

Newton built the first reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum. His work on light was collected in his influential book Opticks, published in He formulated an empirical law of cooling, which was the first heat transfer formulation and serves as the formal basis of convective heat transfer,^[18] made the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound, and introduced the notions of a Newtonian fluid and a black body.

Furthermore, he made early investigations into electricity,^[19][20] with an idea from his book Opticks arguably the beginning of the field theory of the electric force.^[21] In addition to his creation of calculus, as a mathematician, he generalized the binomial theorem to any real number, contributed to the study of power series, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, classified most of the cubic plane curves, and also originated the Newton-Cotes formulas for numerical integration.

He further devised an early form of regression analysis.^[23]

Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge; he was appointed at the age of He was a devout but unorthodox Christian who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.

Sir isaac newton facts biography wikipedia

Isaac Newton (born December 25, [January 4, , New Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England—died March 20 [March 31], , London) was an English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.

He refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, unlike most members of the Cambridge faculty of the day. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. Politically and personally tied to the Whig party, Newton served two brief terms as Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, in – and – He was knighted by Queen Anne in and spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (–) and Master (–) of the Royal Mint, in which he increased the accuracy and security of British coinage,^[24][25] as well as president of the Royal Society (–).

Early life

Main article: Early life of Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December (NS 4 January ^[a]) at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire.^[26] His father, also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before.

Born prematurely, Newton was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug.^[27] When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough (née Blythe).

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Newton disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of "Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them."^[28] Newton's mother had three children (Mary, Benjamin, and Hannah) from her second marriage.

The King's School

From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School in Grantham, which taught Latin and Ancient Greek and probably imparted a significant foundation of mathematics.^[30] He was removed from school by his mother and returned to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth by October His mother, widowed for the second time, attempted to make him a farmer, an occupation he hated.

Henry Stokes, master at The King's School, persuaded his mother to send him back to school. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student, distinguishing himself mainly by building sundials and models of windmills.

University of Cambridge

In June , Newton was admitted to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

His uncle the Reverend William Ayscough, who had studied at Cambridge, recommended him to the university. At Cambridge, Newton started as a subsizar, paying his way by performing valet duties until he was awarded a scholarship in , which covered his university costs for four more years until the completion of his MA. At the time, Cambridge's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, whom Newton read along with then more modern philosophers, including Descartes and astronomers such as Galileo Galilei and Thomas Street.

He set down in his notebook a series of "Quaestiones" about mechanical philosophy as he found it. In , he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus.

Sir isaac newton family tree In , he was knighted by Queen Anne of England, making him Sir Isaac Newton. Early Life and Family Newton was born on January 4, , in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England.

Soon after Newton obtained his BA degree at Cambridge in August , the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague.^[35]

Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student, his private studies and the years following his bachelor's degree have been described as "the richest and most productive ever experienced by a scientist".^[36] The next two years alone saw the development of theories on calculus,^[37]optics, and the law of gravitation, at his home in Woolsthorpe.^[38]

In April , Newton returned to the University of Cambridge, and in October he was elected as a fellow of Trinity.^[39] Fellows were required to take holy orders and be ordained as Anglican priests, although this was not enforced in the Restoration years, and an assertion of conformity to the Church of England was sufficient.

He made the commitment that "I will either set Theology as the object of my studies and will take holy orders when the time prescribed by these statutes [7&#;years] arrives, or I will resign from the college." Up until this point he had not thought much about religion and had twice signed his agreement to the Thirty-nine Articles, the basis of Church of England doctrine.

By the issue could not be avoided, and by then his unconventional views stood in the way.

His academic work impressed the Lucasian professorIsaac Barrow, who was anxious to develop his own religious and administrative potential (he became master of Trinity College two years later); in , Newton succeeded him, only one year after receiving his MA.

Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and King Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument; thus, a conflict between Newton's religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was averted. He was appointed at the age of ^[44]

The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge position included the responsibility of instructing geography.^[45] In , and again in , Newton published a revised, corrected, and amended edition of the Geographia Generalis, a geography textbook first published in by the then-deceased Bernhardus Varenius.^[46] In the Geographia Generalis, Varenius attempted to create a theoretical foundation linking scientific principles to classical concepts in geography, and considered geography to be a mix between science and pure mathematics applied to quantifying features of the Earth.^[45][47] While it is unclear if Newton ever lectured in geography, the Dugdale and Shaw English translation of the book stated Newton published the book to be read by students while he lectured on the subject.^[45] The Geographia Generalis is viewed by some as the dividing line between ancient and modern traditions in the history of geography, and Newton's involvement in the subsequent editions is thought to be a large part of the reason for this enduring legacy.^[48]

Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in ^[1]

Mid-life

Calculus

Newton's work has been said "to distinctly advance every branch of mathematics then studied".

His work on the subject, usually referred to as fluxions or calculus, seen in a manuscript of October , is now published among Newton's mathematical papers.^[50] His work De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas, sent by Isaac Barrow to John Collins in June , was identified by Barrow in a letter sent to Collins that August as the work "of an extraordinary genius and proficiency in these things".

Newton later became involved in a dispute with Leibniz over priority in the development of calculus. Both are now credited with independently developing calculus, though with very different mathematical notations. However, it is established that Newton came to develop calculus much earlier than Leibniz.^[52] Leibniz's notation is recognized as the more convenient notation, being adopted by continental European mathematicians, and after , by British mathematicians.^[54]

Historian of science A.

Rupert Hall notes that while Leibniz deserves credit for his independent formulation of calculus, Newton was undoubtedly the first to develop it, stating:

But all these matters are of little weight in comparison with the central truth, which has indeed long been universally recognized, that Newton was master of the essential techniques of the calculus by the end of , almost exactly nine years before Leibniz .

. . Newton’s claim to have mastered the new infinitesimal calculus long before Leibniz, and even to have written — or at least made a good start upon — a publishable exposition of it as early as , is certainly borne out by copious evidence, and though Leibniz and some of his friends sought to belittle Newton’s case, the truth has not been seriously in doubt for the last years.

Hall further notes that in Principia, Newton was able to "formulate and resolve problems by the integration of differential equations" and "in fact, he anticipated in his book many results that later exponents of the calculus regarded as their own novel achievements."

It has been noted that despite the convenience of Leibniz's notation, Newton's notation could still have been used to develop multivariate techniques, with his dot notation still widely used in physics.

Some academics have noted the richness and depth of Newton's work, such as physicist Roger Penrose, stating "in most cases Newton’s geometrical methods are not only more concise and elegant, they reveal deeper principles than would become evident by the use of those formal methods of calculus that nowadays would seem more direct." Mathematician Vladimir Arnold states "Comparing the texts of Newton with the comments of his successors, it is striking how Newton’s original presentation is more modern, more understandable and richer in ideas than the translation due to commentators of his geometrical ideas into the formal language of the calculus of Leibniz."^[57]

His work extensively uses calculus in geometric form based on limiting values of the ratios of vanishingly small quantities: in the Principia itself, Newton gave demonstration of this under the name of "the method of first and last ratios"^[58] and explained why he put his expositions in this form,^[59] remarking also that "hereby the same thing is performed as by the method of indivisibles."^[60] Because of this, the Principia has been called "a book dense with the theory and application of the infinitesimal calculus" in modern times^[61] and in Newton's time "nearly all of it is of this calculus."^[62] His use of methods involving "one or more orders of the infinitesimally small" is present in his De motu corporum in gyrum of ^[63] and in his papers on motion "during the two decades preceding ".^[64]

Newton had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared controversy and criticism.

Sir isaac newton facts biography for kids Sir Isaac Newton (25 December – 20 March /27 [a]) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. [5] Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. [6].

He was close to the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. In , Duillier started to write a new version of Newton's Principia, and corresponded with Leibniz. In , the relationship between Duillier and Newton deteriorated and the book was never completed. Starting in , Duillier accused Leibniz of plagiarism.^[68] Mathematician John Keill accused Leibniz of plagiarism in in the Royal Society journal, thereby deteriorating the situation even more.

The dispute then broke out in full force in when the Royal Society proclaimed in a study that it was Newton who was the true discoverer and labelled Leibniz a fraud; it was later found that Newton wrote the study's concluding remarks on Leibniz. Thus began the bitter controversy which marred the lives of both men until Leibniz's death in

Newton is credited with the generalised binomial theorem, valid for any exponent.

He discovered Newton's identities, Newton's method, classified cubic plane curves (polynomials of degree three in two variables), made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences, with Newton regarded as "the single most significant contributor to finite difference interpolation", with many formulas created by Newton.^[71] He was the first to state Bézout's theorem, and was also the first to use fractional indices and to employ coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations.

He approximated partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms (a precursor to Euler's summation formula) and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power series. His work on infinite series was inspired by Simon Stevin's decimals.^[72]

Optics

In , Newton observed that the spectrum of colours exiting a prism in the position of minimum deviation is oblong, even when the light ray entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colours by different angles.^[74][75] This led him to conclude that colour is a property intrinsic to light – a point which had, until then, been a matter of debate.

From to , Newton lectured on optics.^[76] During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that the multicoloured image produced by a prism, which he named a spectrum, could be recomposed into white light by a lens and a second prism. Modern scholarship has revealed that Newton's analysis and resynthesis of white light owes a debt to corpuscular alchemy.^[78]

In his work on Newton's rings in , he used a method that was unprecedented in the 17th century, as "he averaged all of the differences, and he then calculated the difference between the average and the value for the first ring", in effect introducing a now standard method for reducing noise in measurements, and which does not appear elsewhere at the time.^[79] He extended his "error-slaying method" to studies of equinoxes in , which was described as an "altogether unprecedented method" but differed in that here "Newton required good values for each of the original equinoctial times, and so he devised a method that allowed them to, as it were, self-correct."^[23] Newton is credited with introducing "an embryonic linear regression analysis.

Not only did he perform the averaging of a set of data, 50 years before Tobias Mayer, but summing the residuals to zero he forced the regression line to pass through the average point". Newton also "distinguished between two inhomogeneous sets of data and might have thought of an optimal solution in terms of bias, though not in terms of effectiveness".^[80]

He showed that coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects, and that regardless of whether reflected, scattered, or transmitted, the light remains the same colour.

Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory of colour.

From this work, he concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours (chromatic aberration).

As a proof of the concept, he constructed a telescope using reflective mirrors instead of lenses as the objective to bypass that problem.

Sir isaac newton life story: Sir Isaac Newton (25 December – 20 March /27 [a]) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. [5] Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. [6].

Building the design, the first known functional reflecting telescope, today known as a Newtonian telescope, involved solving the problem of a suitable mirror material and shaping technique.^[82] He grounded his own mirrors out of a custom composition of highly reflective speculum metal, using Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes.

In late ,^[83] he was able to produce this first reflecting telescope. It was about eight inches long and it gave a clearer and larger image. In , he was asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope by the Royal Society. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes, Of Colours,^[85] which he later expanded into the work Opticks.

When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. Newton and Hooke had brief exchanges in –80, when Hooke, appointed to manage the Royal Society's correspondence, opened up a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions,^[86] which had the effect of stimulating Newton to work out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector.

The two men remained generally on poor terms until Hooke's death.^[87]

Newton argued that light is composed of particles or corpuscles, which were refracted by accelerating into a denser medium. He verged on soundlike waves to explain the repeated pattern of reflection and transmission by thin films (Opticks Bk.

II, Props. 12), but still retained his theory of 'fits' that disposed corpuscles to be reflected or transmitted (Props). Physicists later favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for the interference patterns and the general phenomenon of diffraction. Despite his known preference of a particle theory, Newton in fact noted that light had both particle-like and wave-like properties in Opticks, and was the first to attempt to reconcile the two theories, thereby anticipating later developments of wave-particle duality, which is the modern understanding of light.^[88]

In his Hypothesis of Light of , Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles.

The contact with the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More revived his interest in alchemy.^[89] He replaced the ether with occult forces based on Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion between particles. His contributions to science cannot be isolated from his interest in alchemy.^[89] This was at a time when there was no clear distinction between alchemy and science.^[90][91]

In , Newton published Opticks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light, and included a set of queries at the end.

In line with his corpuscle theory, he thought that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another,&#; and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?"^[92] He also constructed a primitive form of a frictional electrostatic generator, using a glass globe.^[93]

In Opticks, he was the first to show a diagram using a prism as a beam expander, and also the use of multiple-prism arrays.^[94] Some years after Newton's discussion, multiple-prism beam expanders became central to the development of narrow-linewidthtunable lasers.

Also, the use of these prismatic beam expanders led to the multiple-prism dispersion theory.^[94]

Subsequent to Newton, much has been amended. Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel discarded Newton's particle theory in favour of Huygens' wave theory to show that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength.

Science also slowly came to realise the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics. The German poet and scientist, Goethe, could not shake the Newtonian foundation but "one hole Goethe did find in Newton's armour,&#; Newton had committed himself to the doctrine that refraction without colour was impossible.

He, therefore, thought that the object-glasses of telescopes must forever remain imperfect, achromatism and refraction being incompatible. This inference was proved by Dollond to be wrong."^[95]

Gravity

Newton had been developing his theory of gravitation as far back as ^[38][96] In , Newton returned to his work on celestial mechanics by considering gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets with reference to Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

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This followed stimulation by a brief exchange of letters in –80 with Hooke, who had been appointed Secretary of the Royal Society,^[97] and who opened a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions.^[86] Newton's reawakening interest in astronomical matters received further stimulus by the appearance of a comet in the winter of –, on which he corresponded with John Flamsteed.

After the exchanges with Hooke, Newton worked out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector. Newton communicated his results to Edmond Halley and to the Royal Society in De motu corporum in gyrum, a tract written on about nine sheets which was copied into the Royal Society's Register Book in December ^[99] This tract contained the nucleus that Newton developed and expanded to form the Principia.

The Principia