Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton established that the same laws govern falling bodies on earth and the motion of planets, and built the mathematics required to prove it. Born prematurely in Lincolnshire in 1642, he was raised by his grandmother after his widowed mother remarried, and went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661. When plague closed the university in 1665-66 he returned home and in about eighteen months laid the foundations of calculus, his theory of colour, and the inverse-square law of gravitation. He built the first practical reflecting telescope in 1668, avoiding the colour fringing of lenses, and his 1672 paper showed by prism experiment that white light is a mixture of colours rather than a modification of pure light. Prompted by Edmond Halley, who paid for the printing, he published the Principia Mathematica in 1687. It set out three laws of motion and universal gravitation, and derived Kepler's planetary laws from them — the founding demonstration that nature is described by mathematics. He was intensely secretive and quarrelsome. His priority dispute with Leibniz over calculus, which both had invented independently, poisoned English and continental mathematics for a century, and Newton controlled the Royal Society committee that adjudicated in his own favour. He wrote more on alchemy and biblical chronology than on physics, holding heterodox anti-Trinitarian views he concealed to keep his fellowship. He became Warden of the Mint in 1696 and Master in 1699, took the recoinage seriously, and prosecuted counterfeiters to the gallows. He served as president of the Royal Society from 1703 and was knighted in 1705. His mechanics held without correction until Einstein, and remains accurate for everything short of high velocity or intense gravitation. He died in 1727.

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