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Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and physicist. He was considered one of the greatest scientists in history. Newton was also the culminating figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Newton was best known for his discovery that the force called gravity affects all objects in space and on earth.
.Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, in the hamlet of Wollsthorpe, Lincolnshire (R.S.W. 17) His Father died only three months before he was born (Sir Isaac Newton 1). When he was three years old Isaac's mother, Hanna, placed him with his grandmother so that she could remarry a man named Barnabas Smith, a wealthy man from North Witham (Dr. Robert A. Hatch 1).
When his mother returned to Woolsthorpe in 1653, Newton was withdrawn from school to fulfill his birthright as a farmer. Newton failed at farming, and returned to King's School at Grantham to prepare for entrance to Trinity College, Cambridge. A turning point in Newton's life was when he left Woolsthorpe for Cambridge University in June of 1661 (Dr. Robert A. Hatch 1).
Although Cambridge was a marvelous center of learning, the spirit of the scientific revolution had yet to enter its curriculum. In 1665 Isaac Newton took his bachelor's degree at Cambridge without honors or distinction (Dr. Robert A. Hatch 2). In 1665 the university was closed because of the plague. At this time Newton returned to Woolsthorpe. There, in the following 18 months, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy (J. A. Schuster 1).
During the plague years, Isaac Newton laid the foundation for elementary differential and integral Calculus. He invented the "method of fluxions" which was based on his crucial insight that finding the area under its curve is the inverse procedure to finding the slope of the curve at any point (J. A. Schuster 1). Also during the plague years he made remarkable discoveries in optics. He had reached the conclusion that white light is not a...