Isaac Newton - Mathematician, Physicist and Astronomer
Isaac Newton was born about three months after the death of his father, who was also given the name Isaac at birth. He had three siblings; one stepbrother, and two stepsisters. His mother was named Hannah Ayscough. Isaac Newton was later put in the hands of his grandmother, who had to take care of him after his mother had remarried and moved away. Newton then grew up in England, and until 12 years of age was being taught in the local schools, then was sent to the King’s School in Grantham, England, where he then lived in a pharmacist’s home. While living in this person’s home, young Isaac had grown fond of the pharmacist’s chemical library and laboratory, which lead him to start tinkering. He had created many contraptions, including sundials, and windmills run by mice. Now that’s impressive!
After some time, Isaac’s stepfather had passed away, which made his mother return to his home, take Newton out of his school to work/run the family farm. He soon learned that reading was much more preferred than labor working and found that it was basically his destiny to leave the farm to go out and study.
When Isaac Newton had turned the age of 19, he had moved to Cambridge, England, and studied at Trinity College. After receiving his well-deserved bachelor’s degree, he continued his studies for a master’s degree. This was around 1665, so as you may know, the plague has begun, due to a rat problem. This has caused Newton to return to his home in Woolsthorpe, where he began to experiment, which later started thinking about gravitation. He also began looking into optics. He soon created his own system of calculus, which is quite intense when you think about it. After the mess with the plague, Newton had returned to Cambridge and continued his journey to complete his master’s degree. After such a feat, he had continued his work from earlier about gravitation and optics. Isaac Newton had become a mathematics professor when his math professor told Isaac to take his place.
Newton had experimented in optics, where his lectures and work was devoted to such a part of physics. He would talk about telescopes and how they worked, then thought about working to make them better. He then made many discoveries about light, and its implications in the real world, including telescopes, which would help lead him on to finding out that a telescope utilizing reflections would increase its effectiveness of them. Newton then built a telescope, which he sent to the Royal Society, where he was later honored by them, and then was elected to their membership.
There was a point in his career, where he had published some of his work on light, but then was greatly criticized for his work by many, including other physicists. They had refused his findings, and even though he tried to give further explanation for such work, they would just continue to criticize him, therefore he had then sworn off publishing his work, and he was almost pushed to the point where he was about to give up his work on science. As we know now, he had not given up and is now basically known as the father of modern science.
Later in his life, Newton had written a lot of literature about his findings in his work. He wrote books such as Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and Optiks, which were some of his most famous works of science. In these books, it shows the law of universal gravitation, which solved many difficult problems relating to motion, where everyone else had a hard time finding the answer to. We now acknowledge Newton's 3 laws of motion, which answer basically any question about the physics of motion on any plane. He also made optics very much more approachable by anyone with his book, Optiks. Newton is now a knighted man, as well as seen as the leading scientist of his time!
