Isaac (sir) Newton

Isaac (sir) Newton

Most people know Isaac (sir) Newton for his three laws of motion, whitch were: inertia, force and reciprocal action. Although he didn't completely create these (Hipparchus, Ibn al-Haytham, Galileo and Huygens had already built these basic principles) he was the first to realize that gravity was what kept the planets in orbit. He also published the Cooling Law of Thermodynamics and was a early role in the atomic theory.

Newton's early fame though, came from his inventions like the first reflecting telescope (which were the best of that time), the first reflecting microscope and the sextant.

Newton was known as the father of calculus (even though he didn't invent it) he applied it to several purposes like finding areas, tangents and the maxima and minima of functions.  Along with other geometric wonders he made the Binomial Theorem and power series for exponential and trigonometric functions. His equation e^x = ∑ x^k / k! has been named the most important series in mathematics ever. He developed facts about cubic equations (like the shadow of a cone) and took the time to create an approximation to π (it was better than Vieta's but not as good as al-Kashi's.)

"It is the weight not the numbers of experiments that is to be regarded,"- Isaac Newton

Most people know Isaac Newton as a scientist and would not think of him as a mathematician (I was one of them until I did my reasearch) but his amazing work with algebra, calculus and geometry proves that wrong. He was also the first to solve the Problem of Pappus and  Problem of the Brachistochrone.

In the year of 1687 he published a book called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,in of which he analyzed the consequences of his Laws of Motion and introduced the Law of Universal Gravitation. 

In conclusion Newton is one of the most mathematically (and scientifically) influential people that ever lived.

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