Isaac Newton: Life, Work & Inventions

Sir Isaac Newton was a mathematician and astronomer from the 17th century. His work and inventions dedicated a lot to the math and science that we use today. Let’s start from the beginning. Sir Isaac Newton was born on January 4th, 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. He was the only son of a prosperous farmer who was also named Isaac who died three months before he was born. Newton was a premature baby, born very small and weak. The doctors told his mother that he was not expected to survive. When he was 3 years old his mother, Hannah Ayscough Newton, remarried a minister and left Newton to live with his grandmother. This had a massive effect on Newton's life and later on turned into insecurity. Isaac Newton was enrolled at King’s school, Grantham. A school in his hometown. When he turned 12, Newton reunited with his mother after her second husband had died. She had three other kids with her who became Newton’s step-siblings. During this time Newton’s mother had decided to pull him out of school in order to make him a farmer and have him tend to the lands. Newton was very discouraged with that and thought farming was terrible. As a result, his mother allowed him to go back to school to finish all of his basic education. After finishing up his basic education, Newton’s uncle who had just graduated from college persuaded his mother to let him go on and to further continue his studies. He ended up enrolling at the University of Cambridge's Trinity College and entered a work-study program in 1661. In order to make some extra money while he was in school, he decided to start waiting tables and taking care of the rooms of wealthier students.

During his first three years in the university, he was taught a pretty standard and basic curriculum. Newton was more incurred in advanced math and science so as a result, he spent his free time reading about philosophers which added to his interest in advanced studies. One day while sitting in his garden Newton saw an apple fall from a tree while he was thinking about the forces of nature. Newton soon realized that some force must be acting on falling objects because otherwise, they would not start moving from their resting position. This was the start of how he discovered gravity. He created Newton’s law of universal gravitation. This law says that every particle in the universe will attract other particles with a force that is equal to the product of their masses, and oppositely equal to the square of the distance between them. After witnessing the apple fall Newton wanted to dig deeper and see what he could learn. This led to young Newton creating his 3 laws of motion. Newton developed his laws of motion in 1666 when he was only 23 years old. His 1st law says an object at rest will remain at rest unless a force is acted on it from the outside. The second one says that the acceleration of an object depends on how hard its pushed and how much the object weights. Finally, the third one states that for every action there is an equal reaction. So if you push something you can expect it to move. One day Newton asked one of his friends why the orbits of the planets were an ellipse. After some thinking time, Newton came to the answer that ellipses are actually sections of cones and he wanted to know more. Between all these questions and the fact that his university was closed at the time due to the multiple causes of the bubonic plague, Newton was inspired to expand on mathematics and develop the concepts of differential and integral calculus.

Roughly four years later in 1970 Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed and discovered calculus alone by working off of each other. Both men did quite a bit of work creating equations and a language that could describe nature using numbers. History says that Newton created calculus eight years before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz but Leibniz is still credited because he developed modern European mathematics. He introduced the rules and mathematical symbols. It is said that he created the equals sign (=). Both claim that the other cheated off of them. And for the rest of their lives, this conflict continued being known as the Great Sulk.