Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe 1642 - London 1727) is one of the giants in the history of science. He laid the foundations of differential and integral calculus and classical mechanics—often referred to as "Newtonian mechanics". The year 1666 is known as Newton's annus mirabilis (miraculous year). As a Cambridge student fleeing the bubonic plague, he temporarily stayed at his mother's home and, seeing an apple fall from a tree, discovered the law of gravitation (attraction is proportional with inverse distance squared). It seems that he associated the fall of the apple with the motion of the moon. The same year he discovered the rudiments of differential and integral calculus.

Later in life, as a holder of the Cambridge Lucasian chair of mathematics, Newton worked out his initial ideas into a set of mechanical laws, with his second and most important law: Force is mass times acceleration ($\scriptstyle F=ma~$). Newton was the first to understand the concept of inertial forces, notably the centrifugal force, although Christian Huyghens was close to understanding this effect. In 1684 Newton proved that Kepler's laws follow from his own second law in conjunction with his gravitational law. This proof completed the astronomical revolution initiated by Copernicus.

Newton hated publishing his results, prefering to communicate them to close colleagues. It took Edmond Halley great efforts to convince Newton to write his opus magnum Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (briefly the Principia) that appeared in 1687, a work on mechanics, not on calculus. Although Newton had communicated his discoveries in the calculus privately, he had not published anything formal about it, until finally in 1704 he published Opticks. In the meantime the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had developed his own version of the calculus. Although he acknowledged that Newton was earlier, a nasty priority conflict broke out in the 1710s. Newton and his (mainly English) followers accused Leibniz of plagiarism. The modern view is that both mathematicians discovered the calculus independently.

Later in life Newton became master of the Mint, and received in 1705 a knighthood because of his valuable work on the English money reform.

Bibliography

• Bardi, Jason Socrates. The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time. (2006). 277 pp.
• Bechler, Zev. Newton's Physics and the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution. (1991). 588 pp.
• Berlinski, David. Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World. (2000). 256 pp.
• Buchwald, Jed Z. and Cohen, I. Bernard, eds. Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy. MIT Press, 2001. 354 pp.
• Christianson, Gale E. Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution. Oxford U. Press, 1996. 160 pp. excerpt and text search
• Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. (1984). 608 pp.
• Cohen, I. Bernard and Smith, George E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Newton. (2002). 500 pp. excerpt and text search; complete edition online
• Cohen, I. Bernard. The Newtonian Revolution with Illustrations of the Transformation of Scientific Ideas. Cambridge U. Press, 1981. 404 pp.
• DeGandt, François. Force and Geometry in Newton's Principia. Princeton U. Press, 1995. 296 pp.
• Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought. Cambridge U. Press, 1991. 359 pp.
• Fara, Patricia. Newton: The Making of a Genius. Columbia U. Press, 2003. 347 pp
• Fauvel, John et al., ed. Let Newton Be! Oxford U. Press, (1989). 272 pp.
• Force, James E. and Hutton, Sarah, ed. Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies. (2004). 246 pp.
• Gjertsen, Derek. The Newton Handbook. (1987). 665 pp.
• Gleick, James. Isaac Newton.(2003). 272 pp.
• Hall, A. Rupert. All Was Light: An Introduction to Newton's Opticks. Oxford U. Press, 1993. 252 pp.
• Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought. (1992). 468 pp. excerpt and text search
• Hoskin, Michael. "Newton and Newtonianism" pp 130-67 in Hoskin, ed. The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy (1999) excerpt and text search
• Mandelbrote, Scott. Footprints of the Lion: Isaac Newton at Work. Cambridge U. Press, (2001). 142 pp
• Park, Katharine, and Lorraine Daston, eds. The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3: Early Modern Science (2006) excerpt and text search
• Sepper, Dennis L. Newton's Optical Writings: A Guided Study. Rutgers U. Press, 1994. 224 pp. excerpt and text search
• Shapiro, Alan E. Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms: Physics, Method, and Chemistry and Newton's Theories of Colored Bodies and Fits of Easy Reflection. Cambridge U. Press, (1993). 400 pp.
• Thrower, Norman J. W., ed. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Longer View of Newton and Halley: Essays Commemorating the Tercentenary of Newton's Principia and the 1985-1986 Return of Comet Halley. U. of California Press, 1990. 429 pp.
• Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. 2 vol. Cambridge U. Press, 1981. 895 pp. the major scholarly biography excerpt and text search
  • Westfall, Richard S. The Life of Isaac Newton. Cambridge U. Press, (1993). 328 pp., short version excerpt and text search
• White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Socerer. (1998). 416 pp. online edition

Primary sources

• Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. U. of California Press, (1999). 974 pp.
• Newton, Isaac. The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton. Vol. 1: The Optical Lectures, 1670-1672. Cambridge U. Press, 1984. 627 pp.
• Brackenridge, J. Bruce. The Key to Newton's Dynamics: The Kepler Problem and the Principia: Containing an English Translation of Sections 1, 2, and 3 of Book One from the First (1687) Edition of Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. U. of California Press, 1996. 299 pp.
• Newton's Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings edited by H. S. Thayer, (1953), online edition