Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 [4 January 1643, New Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire — 20 March 1727, London; aged 84) was an English physicist and mathematician and the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution. Admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661, he spent the plague years 1665–67 at Woolsthorpe, where he established the fundamentals of the calculus, separated white light by refraction and — as he later told William Stukeley — began thinking about gravity when he saw an apple fall. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672 after his reflecting telescope caused a sensation, he quarrelled with Robert Hooke over light and (in a 1676 letter) wrote that if he had seen further it was by “standing on the sholders of Giants”. Prompted by Edmond Halley in 1684, he sent the tract De Motu, which in two and a half years grew into Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in July 1687 entirely at Halley’s expense; its three laws of motion and law of universal gravitation made it, in Britannica’s words, one of the most important works in the history of modern science. Warden of the Mint from 1696 and Master from Christmas Day 1699, President of the Royal Society from 1703 and knighted in 1705, he died unmarried at Kensington on 20 March 1727 and lies in Westminster Abbey, where Rysbrack’s monument shows him among instruments, coins and books. His alchemical and theological manuscripts — over which he waged a bitter priority dispute with Leibniz — became public largely after World War II, and his scientific papers are now a UNESCO Memory of the World collection.