Newton when was he born

In the two years he spent in inadvertent exile from Cambridge, Newton made extraordinary strides in mathematics, creating the basis of modern calculus. He wrote De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum in , though it was not published during his lifetime. His fresh ideas began to circulate among the leading mathematicians of the day. He also delved into astronomy and optics.

He was one of the first to argue that white light is actually composed of many different colours, and he constructed one of the first reflecting telescopes. He donated one of his telescopes to the Royal Society in , and was named a full fellow of the society.

Unfortunately, Newton quarreled with several of the leading scientists of the time, and was reluctant to publish his experiments and philosophies. It was only under the urging of astronomer Edmund Halley he of Halley's Comet fame that Newton was persuaded to publish his ideas on physics and astronomy, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica In this work he first laid out his law of universal gravitation.

The book provoked a storm of scientific argument and admiration. Shortly after this, he was elected to Parliament as a representative of the university. Newton died on 20 March at the age of His contemporaries' conception of him nevertheless continued to expand as a consequence of various posthumous publications, including The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended ; the work originally intended to be the last book of the Principia , The System of the World , in both English and Latin ; Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St.

Even then, however, the works that had been published represented only a limited fraction of the total body of papers that had been left in the hands of Catherine and John Conduitt. The five volume collection of Newton's works edited by Samuel Horsley —85 did not alter this situation. Through the marriage of the Conduitts' daughter Catherine and subsequent inheritance, this body of papers came into the possession of Lord Portsmouth, who agreed in to allow it to be reviewed by scholars at Cambridge University John Couch Adams, George Stokes, H.

Luard, and G. They issued a catalogue in , and the university then retained all the papers of a scientific character. With the notable exception of W. The remaining papers were returned to Lord Portsmouth, and then ultimately sold at auction in to various parties. Serious scholarly work on them did not get underway until the s, and much remains to be done on them.

Three factors stand in the way of giving an account of Newton's work and influence. First is the contrast between the public Newton, consisting of publications in his lifetime and in the decade or two following his death, and the private Newton, consisting of his unpublished work in math and physics, his efforts in chymistry — that is, the 17th century blend of alchemy and chemistry — and his writings in radical theology — material that has become public mostly since World War II.

Only the public Newton influenced the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet any account of Newton himself confined to this material can at best be only fragmentary. Second is the contrast, often shocking, between the actual content of Newton's public writings and the positions attributed to him by others, including most importantly his popularizers.

Third is the contrast between the enormous range of subjects to which Newton devoted his full concentration at one time or another during the 60 years of his intellectual career — mathematics, optics, mechanics, astronomy, experimental chemistry, alchemy, and theology — and the remarkably little information we have about what drove him or his sense of himself.

Biographers and analysts who try to piece together a unified picture of Newton and his intellectual endeavors often end up telling us almost as much about themselves as about Newton. Compounding the diversity of the subjects to which Newton devoted time are sharp contrasts in his work within each subject. The most important element common to these two was Newton's deep commitment to having the empirical world serve not only as the ultimate arbiter, but also as the sole basis for adopting provisional theory.

Throughout all of this work he displayed distrust of what was then known as the method of hypotheses — putting forward hypotheses that reach beyond all known phenomena and then testing them by deducing observable conclusions from them.

Newton insisted instead on having specific phenomena decide each element of theory, with the goal of limiting the provisional aspect of theory as much as possible to the step of inductively generalizing from the specific phenomena. This stance is perhaps best summarized in his fourth Rule of Reasoning, added in the third edition of the Principia , but adopted as early as his Optical Lectures of the s:.

In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be taken to be either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction may not be nullified by hypotheses. Such a commitment to empirically driven science was a hallmark of the Royal Society from its very beginnings, and one can find it in the research of Kepler, Galileo, Huygens, and in the experimental efforts of the Royal Academy of Paris.

Newton, however, carried this commitment further first by eschewing the method of hypotheses and second by displaying in his Principia and Opticks how rich a set of theoretical results can be secured through well-designed experiments and mathematical theory designed to allow inferences from phenomena. The success of those after him in building on these theoretical results completed the process of transforming natural philosophy into modern empirical science.

Newton's commitment to having phenomena decide the elements of theory required questions to be left open when no available phenomena could decide them.

Newton contrasted himself most strongly with Leibniz in this regard at the end of his anonymous review of the Royal Society's report on the priority dispute over the calculus:. Newton could have said much the same about the question of what light consists of, waves or particles, for while he felt that the latter was far more probable, he saw it still not decided by any experiment or phenomenon in his lifetime.

Leaving questions about the ultimate cause of gravity and the constitution of light open was the other factor in his work driving a wedge between natural philosophy and empirical science. The many other areas of Newton's intellectual endeavors made less of a difference to eighteenth century philosophy and science.

In mathematics, Newton was the first to develop a full range of algorithms for symbolically determining what we now call integrals and derivatives, but he subsequently became fundamentally opposed to the idea, championed by Leibniz, of transforming mathematics into a discipline grounded in symbol manipulation.

Newton thought the only way of rendering limits rigorous lay in extending geometry to incorporate them, a view that went entirely against the tide in the development of mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth ceturies. In chemistry Newton conducted a vast array of experiments, but the experimental tradition coming out of his Opticks , and not his experiments in chemistry, lay behind Lavoisier calling himself a Newtonian; indeed, one must wonder whether Lavoisier would even have associated his new form of chemistry with Newton had he been aware of Newton's fascination with writings in the alchemical tradition.

And even in theology, there is Newton the anti-Trinitarian mild heretic who was not that much more radical in his departures from Roman and Anglican Christianity than many others at the time, and Newton, the wild religious zealot predicting the end of the Earth, who did not emerge to public view until quite recently.

There is surprisingly little cross-referencing of themes from one area of Newton's endeavors to another. The common element across almost all of them is that of a problem-solver extraordinaire , taking on one problem at a time and staying with it until he had found, usually rather promptly, a solution. All of his technical writings display this, but so too does his unpublished manuscript reconstructing Solomon's Temple from the biblical account of it and his posthumously published Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms in which he attempted to infer from astronomical phenomena the dating of major events in the Old Testament.

The Newton one encounters in his writings seems to compartmentalize his interests at any given moment. Whether he had a unified conception of what he was up to in all his intellectual efforts, and if so what this conception might be, has been a continuing source of controversy among Newton scholars.

Of course, were it not for the Principia , there would be no entry at all for Newton in an Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In science, he would have been known only for the contributions he made to optics, which, while notable, were no more so than those made by Huygens and Grimaldi, neither of whom had much impact on philosophy; and in mathematics, his failure to publish would have relegated his work to not much more than a footnote to the achievements of Leibniz and his school.

But this adds still a further complication, for the Principia itself was substantially different things to different people. The press-run of the first edition estimated to be around was too small for it to have been read by all that many individuals. The second edition also appeared in two pirated Amsterdam editions, and hence was much more widely available, as was the third edition and its English and later French translation.

The Principia , however, is not an easy book to read, so one must still ask, even of those who had access to it, whether they read all or only portions of the book and to what extent they grasped the full complexity of what they read. The detailed commentary provided in the three volume Jesuit edition —42 made the work less daunting. An important question to ask of any philosophers commenting on Newton is, what primary sources had they read? The s witnessed a major transformation in the standing of the science in the Principia.

The Principia itself had left a number of loose-ends, most of them detectable by only highly discerning readers. Instruction at Cambridge was dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle but some freedom of study was allowed in the third year of the course. Newton studied the philosophy of Descartes , Gassendi , Hobbes , and in particular Boyle. The mechanics of the Copernican astronomy of Galileo attracted him and he also studied Kepler 's Optics. It is a fascinating account of how Newton's ideas were already forming around He headed the text with a Latin statement meaning " Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth" showing himself a free thinker from an early stage.

How Newton was introduced to the most advanced mathematical texts of his day is slightly less clear. According to de Moivre , Newton's interest in mathematics began in the autumn of when he bought an astrology book at a fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in it.

Attempting to read a trigonometry book, he found that he lacked knowledge of geometry and so decided to read Barrow 's edition of Euclid 's Elements. The first few results were so easy that he almost gave up but he Returning to the beginning, Newton read the whole book with a new respect.

Newton also studied Wallis 's Algebra and it appears that his first original mathematical work came from his study of this text. He read Wallis 's method for finding a square of equal area to a parabola and a hyperbola which used indivisibles. Newton made notes on Wallis 's treatment of series but also devised his own proofs of the theorems writing:- Thus Wallis doth it, but it may be done thus It would be easy to think that Newton's talent began to emerge on the arrival of Barrow to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge in when he became a Fellow at Trinity College.

Certainly the date matches the beginnings of Newton's deep mathematical studies. However, it would appear that the date is merely a coincidence and that it was only some years later that Barrow recognised the mathematical genius among his students. Despite some evidence that his progress had not been particularly good, Newton was elected a scholar on 28 April and received his bachelor's degree in April It would appear that his scientific genius had still not emerged, but it did so suddenly when the plague closed the University in the summer of and he had to return to Lincolnshire.

There, in a period of less than two years, while Newton was still under 25 years old, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy. While Newton remained at home he laid the foundations for differential and integral calculus, several years before its independent discovery by Leibniz. The 'method of fluxions', as he termed it, was based on his crucial insight that the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure to differentiating it.

Taking differentiation as the basic operation, Newton produced simple analytical methods that unified many separate techniques previously developed to solve apparently unrelated problems such as finding areas, tangents , the lengths of curves and the maxima and minima of functions.

When the University of Cambridge reopened after the plague in , Newton put himself forward as a candidate for a fellowship.

In October he was elected to a minor fellowship at Trinity College but, after being awarded his Master's Degree, he was elected to a major fellowship in July which allowed him to dine at the Fellows' Table. In July Barrow tried to ensure that Newton's mathematical achievements became known to the world.

He sent Newton's text De Analysi to Collins in London writing:- [ Newton ] brought me the other day some papers, wherein he set down methods of calculating the dimensions of magnitudes like that of Mr Mercator concerning the hyperbola, but very general; as also of resolving equations; which I suppose will please you; and I shall send you them by the next.

Collins corresponded with all the leading mathematicians of the day so Barrow 's action should have led to quick recognition. Collins showed Brouncker , the President of the Royal Society , Newton's results with the author's permission but after this Newton requested that his manuscript be returned. Collins could not give a detailed account but de Sluze and Gregory learnt something of Newton's work through Collins.

Barrow resigned the Lucasian chair in to devote himself to divinity, recommending that Newton still only 27 years old be appointed in his place.

Shortly after this Newton visited London and twice met with Collins but, as he wrote to Gregory Newton's first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics and this was the topic of his first lecture course begun in January He had reached the conclusion during the two plague years that white light is not a simple entity.

Every scientist since Aristotle had believed that white light was a basic single entity, but the chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced Newton otherwise. When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism Newton noted the spectrum of colours that was formed. He argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays which are refracted at slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray produces a different spectral colour.

Newton was led by this reasoning to the erroneous conclusion that telescopes using refracting lenses would always suffer chromatic aberration. He therefore proposed and constructed a reflecting telescope.

In Newton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society after donating a reflecting telescope. Also in Newton published his first scientific paper on light and colour in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The paper was generally well received but Hooke and Huygens objected to Newton's attempt to prove, by experiment alone, that light consists of the motion of small particles rather than waves. The reception that his publication received did nothing to improve Newton's attitude to making his results known to the world.

He was always pulled in two directions, there was something in his nature which wanted fame and recognition yet another side of him feared criticism and the easiest way to avoid being criticised was to publish nothing. Certainly one could say that his reaction to criticism was irrational, and certainly his aim to humiliate Hooke in public because of his opinions was abnormal.

However, perhaps because of Newton's already high reputation, his corpuscular theory reigned until the wave theory was revived in the 19 th century. Newton's relations with Hooke deteriorated further when, in , Hooke claimed that Newton had stolen some of his optical results. Although the two men made their peace with an exchange of polite letters, Newton turned in on himself and away from the Royal Society which he associated with Hooke as one of its leaders. He delayed the publication of a full account of his optical researches until after the death of Hooke in Newton's Opticks appeared in It dealt with the theory of light and colour and with investigations of the colours of thin sheets 'Newton's rings' and diffraction of light.

To explain some of his observations he had to use a wave theory of light in conjunction with his corpuscular theory. His mother died in the following year and he withdrew further into his shell, mixing as little as possible with people for a number of years. Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path.

However he did not have a correct understanding of the mechanics of circular motion. Newton's novel idea of was to imagine that the Earth's gravity influenced the Moon, counter- balancing its centrifugal force.

From his law of centrifugal force and Kepler 's third law of planetary motion, Newton deduced the inverse-square law. In Newton corresponded with Hooke who had written to Newton claiming M Nauenberg writes an account of the next events:- After his correspondence with Hooke , Newton, by his own account, found a proof that Kepler's areal law was a consequence of centripetal forces, and he also showed that if the orbital curve is an ellipse under the action of central forces then the radial dependence of the force is inverse square with the distance from the centre.

This discovery showed the physical significance of Kepler 's second law. In Halley , tired of Hooke 's boasting [ M Nauenberg ] However in 'De Motu.. The proof that inverse square forces imply conic section orbits is sketched in Cor. Halley persuaded Newton to write a full treatment of his new physics and its application to astronomy. The Principia is recognised as the greatest scientific book ever written. Newton analysed the motion of bodies in resisting and non-resisting media under the action of centripetal forces.

The results were applied to orbiting bodies, projectiles, pendulums, and free-fall near the Earth. He further demonstrated that the planets were attracted toward the Sun by a force varying as the inverse square of the distance and generalised that all heavenly bodies mutually attract one another.

Further generalisation led Newton to the law of universal gravitation Newton explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena: the eccentric orbits of comets, the tides and their variations, the precession of the Earth's axis, and motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Sun.

This work made Newton an international leader in scientific research. The Continental scientists certainly did not accept the idea of action at a distance and continued to believe in Descartes ' vortex theory where forces work through contact. However this did not stop the universal admiration for Newton's technical expertise. He had become a convert to the Roman Catholic church in but when he came to the throne he had strong support from Anglicans as well as Catholics. After the death of Hooke in , Newton was elected president of the Royal Society and was annually reelected until his death.

In he published his second major work, the Opticks , based largely on work completed decades before. He was knighted in A lthough his creative years had passed, Newton continued to exercise a profound influence on the development of science. In effect, the Royal Society was Newton's instrument, and he played it to his personal advantage. His tenure as president has been described as tyrannical and autocratic, and his control over the lives and careers of younger disciples was all but absolute.

Newton could not abide contradiction or controversy - his quarrels with Hooke provide singular examples. But in later disputes, as president of the Royal Society, Newton marshaled all the forces at his command. For example, he published Flamsteed's astronomical observations - the labor of a lifetime - without the author's permission; and in his priority dispute with Leibniz concerning the calculus, Newton enlisted younger men to fight his war of words, while behind the lines he secretly directed charge and countercharge.

In the end, the actions of the Society were little more than extensions of Newton's will, and until his death he dominated the landscape of science without rival. Scientific Achievements Mathematics - The origin of Newton's interest in mathematics can be traced to his undergraduate days at Cambridge. But between and his return to Cambridge after the plague, Newton made fundamental contributions to analytic geometry, algebra, and calculus.

Specifically, he discovered the binomial theorem, new methods for expansion of infinite series, and his 'direct and inverse method of fluxions. Hence, a 'fluxion' represents the rate of change of a 'fluent'--a continuously changing or flowing quantity, such as distance, area, or length. In essence, fluxions were the first words in a new language of physics.

N ewton's creative years in mathematics extended from to roughly the spring of Although his predecessors had anticipated various elements of the calculus, Newton generalized and integrated these insights while developing new and more rigorous methods.

The essential elements of his thought were presented in three tracts, the first appearing in a privately circulated treatise, De analysi On Analysis ,which went unpublished until In , Newton developed a more complete account of his method of infinitesimals, which appeared nine years after his death as Methodus fluxionum et serierum infinitarum The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series , In addition to these works, Newton wrote four smaller tracts, two of which were appended to his Opticks of Newton and Leibniz.

N ext to its brilliance, the most characteristic feature of Newton's mathematical career was delayed publication. Newton's priority dispute with Leibniz is a celebrated but unhappy example. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Newton's most capable adversary, began publishing papers on calculus in , almost 20 years after Newton's discoveries commenced. The result of this temporal discrepancy was a bitter dispute that raged for nearly two decades.

The ordeal began with rumors that Leibniz had borrowed ideas from Newton and rushed them into print. It ended with charges of dishonesty and outright plagiarism. The Newton-Leibniz priority dispute--which eventually extended into philosophical areas concerning the nature of God and the universe--ultimately turned on the ambiguity of priority.

It is now generally agreed that Newton and Leibniz each developed the calculus independently, and hence they are considered co-discoverers. But while Newton was the first to conceive and develop his method of fluxions, Leibniz was the first to publish his independent results.

N ewton's optical research, like his mathematical investigations, began during his undergraduate years at Cambridge. But unlike his mathematical work, Newton's studies in optics quickly became public. Shortly after his election to the Royal Society in , Newton published his first paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This paper, and others that followed, drew on his undergraduate researches as well as his Lucasian lectures at Cambridge.

I n , Newton performed a number of experiments on the composition of light. Guided initially by the writings of Kepler and Descartes, Newton's main discovery was that visible white light is heterogeneous--that is, white light is composed of colors that can be considered primary.

Through a brilliant series of experiments, Newton demonstrated that prisms separate rather than modify white light. Contrary to the theories of Aristotle and other ancients, Newton held that white light is secondary and heterogeneous, while the separate colors are primary and homogeneous.

Of perhaps equal importance, Newton also demonstrated that the colors of the spectrum, once thought to be qualities, correspond to an observed and quantifiable 'degree of Refrangibility. N ewton's most famous experiment, the experimentum crucis , demonstrated his theory of the composition of light. Briefly, in a dark room Newton allowed a narrow beam of sunlight to pass from a small hole in a window shutter through a prism, thus breaking the white light into an oblong spectrum on a board.

Then, through a small aperture in the board, Newton selected a given color for example, red to pass through yet another aperture to a second prism, through which it was refracted onto a second board. What began as ordinary white light was thus dispersed through two prisms. N ewton's 'crucial experiment' demonstrated that a selected color leaving the first prism could not be separated further by the second prism.

The selected beam remained the same color, and its angle of refraction was constant throughout. Newton concluded that white light is a 'Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible Rays' and that colors of the spectrum cannot themselves be individually modified, but are 'Original and connate properties. His Lucasian lectures, later published in part as Optical Lectures , supplement other researches published in the Society's Transactions dating from February The Opticks.

T he Opticks of , which first appeared in English, is Newton's most comprehensive and readily accessible work on light and color. In Newton's words, the purpose of the Opticks was 'not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments.