Sir Isaac Newton

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pursue his own interests: mathematics and natural philosophy. Proceeding entirely on his own, he investigated the latest developments in mathematics and the new natural philosophy that treated nature as a complicated machine. Almost immediately, he made fundamental discoveries that were instrumental in his career in science.
The Fluxional Method
Newton's first achievement was in mathematics. He generalized the methods that were being used to draw tangents to curves and to calculate the area swept by curves, and he recognized that the two procedures were inverse operations. By joining them in what he called the fluxional method, Newton developed in the autumn of 1666 a kind of mathematics that is now known as calculus. Calculus was a new and powerful method that carried modern mathematics above the level of Greek geometry.

Optics

Newton's initial lectures as Lucasian Professor dealt with optics, including his remarkable discoveries made during the plague years. He had reached the ...

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reflecting telescope, the first of its kind, and the prototype of the largest modern optical telescopes. In 1671 he donated an improved version to the Royal Society of London, the foremost scientific society of the day. As a consequence, he was elected a fellow of the society in 1672. Later that year Newton published his first scientific paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the society. It dealt with the new theory of light and color and is one of the earliest examples of the short research paper.

Gravitation

Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. Even though Newton also began this ...

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