1. Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727)
“ TO MYSELF I AM ONLY A CHILD PLAYING ON THE BEACH, WHILE VAST OCEANS OF TRUTH LIE UNDISCOVERED BEFORE ME”.Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principa Mathematica, published in 1687, is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the ground work for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation. In optics, he built the first “pratical” reflecting telescope and developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit for the development of the differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed the so called “Newton’s Method” for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.
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