Some facts about the life of Sir Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

   English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton was considered to be one of the most intelligent people who ever lived. Newton articulated the law of universal gravitation and wrote one of the most important books about science of all time. Following a difficult childhood, Newton went at age nineteen to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he studied the works of Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Galileo, and Copernicus. He graduated in 1665, the year the university closed due to an outbreak of bubonic plague, and returned to the family farm. Agricultural work left Newton plenty of time to think and to conduct experiments. He studied the rainbow created by light passed through a prism and realized that white light is really a combination of all the colors. He also invented calculus, a method of calculation by a system of algebraic notations—at the same time as, yet independent of, German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. And it was in the period of farm life after college that Newton developed his famous universal theory of grav­ity. Newton later returned to Cambridge to assume the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics.
   It wasn't until 1687 (twenty years after his original research) that Newton, with the prodding and financial backing of astronomer Edmond Halley, published his uni­versal law of gravitation and three laws of motion in the much-acclaimed Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principies of Natural Philosophy). With this book, Newton radically changed society's notion of the universe and the interconnectedness of its components, much in the same way that Copernicus had done with his model placing the Sun at the center of the solar system. Newton's book brought him great fame, which radically changed his personality. Once a recluse, he became a very ambitious man. He even entered politics and won a seat in the British Parliament. A skilled investor, he was later appointed to oversee his country's money-printing operation. He was also elected president of the Royal Society (an élite English science organization) and in 1705 became Sir Isaac Newton, the second scientist to be knighted after Sir Francis Bacon. Newton was one of the world's greatest thinkers. Astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who explained the theoretical limits of the formation of black holes, went so far as to claim that "Einstein was indeed a giant. But compared with Newton, Einstein runs a very distant second."