Life and Times of Sir Isaac Newton
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. Born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he went to school, he began to attend Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and a Lucasian mathematics professor in 1669. He stayed at the university, lecturing most of the years, until 1696. During these Cambridge years, in which Newton was at the top of his creative power, he singled out 1665-1666 as "the prime of his age for invention". During two to three years of intense mental effort he prepared Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) known mostly as the Principia, though it was not put into print until 1687. As a firm opponent of the attempt by King James II to make the universities into Catholic institutions, Newton was elected Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge to the Convention Parliament of 1689, and was also re-elected again in 1701-1702. Meanwhile, in 1696 he had moved to London as Warden of the Royal Mint. He became Master of the Mint in 1699, an office he held to his death. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
To contemporaries who found the idea of attractions across empty space unintelligible, he conceded that they might prove to be caused by the impacts of unseen particles. In mathematics too, Newton's student notes showed early brilliance. In government, and at the Royal Society, he was an able administrator. Still, he could never quite perfect the difficult theory of the Moon's motion. He explained tidal ebb and flow and the precession of the equinoxes from the forces exerted by the Sun and Moon. Still, Opticks established itself, from about 1715, as a model of the intertwining of theory with quantitative experimentation. The disagreement slowed the reception of Newtonian science on the Continent, and pulled British mathematicians away from sharing the researches of Continental colleagues for a century. His lectures from Cambridge, given from about 1673 to 1683, were published in 1707. Correspondence with Hooke redirected Newton to the problem of the path of a body subjected to a centrally directed force that varies as the inverse square of the distance; he determined it to be an ellipse, so informing Edmond Halley in August 1684. Book II initiates the theory of fluids: Newton solves problems of fluids in movement and of motion through fluids. The publication of Opticks, mostly written by 1692, was delayed by Newton until his critics were dead. In 1684 Leibniz published his first paper on calculus; a small group of mathematicians took up his ideas. A The Calculus Priority Dispute Newton had the essence of the methods of fluxions by 1666. Whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God.
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Council Nicaea,
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