Sir Isaac Newton - The Greatest Genius of All Time

Sir  Isaac   Newton -   The Greatest Genius of All Time

Newton (1642-1727) -  Philosopher, Mathematician, Astronomer, Physicist, Scientist - a versatile personae who spent 19 hours out of 24 hours in writing.  The epitome of hard work.  This reminds me of my strength of 19 hours diligent hard work without taking a break.  His life and great discoveries fascinated me and I have decided that I will devote this space to the great legend in my next post. This is the first time my blog  featuring a Mathematician and Scientist.  Newton was the greatest genius ever lived in this universe.

Newton was most famous for his laws of gravitation and motion.  His finding about light and colors -spectrum -  was amazing too.

His contemporary the writer and philosopher Voltaire wrote in his “Essay on Epic Poetry (1727)” that Sir Isaac Newton walking in his garden had the first thought of his system of gravitation ripen seeing an apple falling from a tree.  He then thought out the fundamental principles of his theory of gravitation.

The famous epitaph by Alexander Pope’s couplet is also apropos –

       “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night;         

         God said “Let Newton be and all was light”.

He was born on a Christmas day in 1642 to a prosperous farmer who was also named Isaac Newton in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom.  His dad wanted him as a farmer to succeed him but he died three months before Newton Jr. was born and thereafter his grandmother fostered him.  His mother married again after her husband’s death. When Newton was in School, his maternal uncle who was an ex-student of Trinity College, Cambridge noticing the boy’s intellectual pursuits persuaded his mother to send him to Cambridge.  He was educated there and received his bachelors as well as masters degrees.  He lived there from 1661 to 1696.  In 1696 he was appointed to a valuable Government office and shifted to London where he resided till his death.  He was 85 years of age when he finally took off to his heavenly abode.  He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 during a royal visit to Cambridge.

The world came to know about his personal life from the Diary he kept.  Newton had sharp features like square jaw, brown eyes and had a broad forehead.  He was short and stout in appearance.  His hair turned grey before he turned thirty and remained white and thick in his rest of life.  He was a chronic bachelor and was a virgin till his death.  He had few friends and spent his time mostly with his inventions and theories.  He was found to be eccentric in his last years.

He was a true absent minded professor.  There were many interesting instances about his absence of  mind.  Once he went to his store room to get wine for his friends and lost in working out a mathematical problem and returned after several hours.  In another instance he went uphill mounted on a horse and reaching there dismounted.    When he wanted to remount on the horse he found that the horse was slipped away leaving the bridle in his hands.  

His major works are –

•          Principia – 1687 (most important book published in the history of science).
•          Opticks – 1704  -  Methods of Fluxions (infinitesimal calculus).
•          The Universal Arithmetic – 1707.
•          The Analysis per Serials.
•          Methods Differentialis – 1711.
•          The Lectimes Opticac – 1729.
•          Geometrica Analytica – 1779.

The volumes have written about Principia – Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). The single most influential book on Physics and possibly all of science and contains information nearly all of concepts of physics except energy. The work offers an exact quantitative description in bodies in motion in three basic laws –

•        A stationery body will lay stationery unless an external force is applied to.
•         Force is equal to mass times acceleration and a change in motion is proportional to      the force applied.
•      For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

His book Principia treats of motion in a resisting medium, and of hydrostatics and hydrodynamics with special application to waves, tides and acoustics.

The Opticks or a treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colors of light.  

Newton’s Theory of Colour  -

In 1666, Newton devised some instruments for grinding lenses to particular forms other than spherical and perhaps he decomposed solar light into different colors.  In 1672, Newton investigated the refractions of light demonstrating that the multi colored spectrum produced by a Prism could be recomposed into white light by a lens and second prism.

Calculus is the math of motion and change. 

Newton used Fluxions to find the tangent and the radius of curvature at any point on a curve and in October 1666 he applied them to several theory of equations.

Infinitesimal Calculus is an available tool in Economics.

His evidence before the House of Commons in 1714 on the determination of longitude at sea marks an important epoch in the history of navigation.

Newton was compared to the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Galileo.

Newton’s work relating to earth, moon and planets gained significance in his time and in the modern world.

Sir Isaac Newton’s contribution to the world is precious and invaluable.  Newton had some critics in his contemporaries but they were like midwives when compared to him. 

Newton’s discoveries lay not only in their imagination but also in their ability to synthesis the insights  allowed them to universal algorithmic process thereby forming a new mathematical system.

I have tried to keep this post concise with brevity, information and make an  interesting read and I hope that I have succeeded in that.

 Let me conclude with Newton’s portrayal of himself –

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.

Sir Isaac Newton was died on March 20, 1727 and was laid to rest at West Minister Abbey.