Isaac Newton Research Paper

Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, 1642 in Woolsthorpe, England. Growing up, he had a troubled childhood and life was hard for him. His father was an illiterate farmer who died before he was born, and his mother married a man that he did not care for which led him to live with his grandmother. Newton was never a psychologically stable man. He had suffered mental and emotional breakdowns in 1678 and 1693. He received a bachelor's degree at Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1655. However, after graduation he was forced to return home for 2 years because of the Great Plague of London. Newton was not a good academic student and pursued his own interests. When he returned to Cambridge in 1667, he had developed infinitesimal calculus,

This theory of gravitation may well be his most famous contribution to science. In David Berlinksi’s book Newton’s Gift, he states that, “It is the law of universal gravitation that Newton saw as the frame of the universe, and what the law says is quite simple” (Berlinski 134). This law specifies that objects with mass attract each other with a force that varies directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between the objects. Before Newton, Aristotle had some similar findings. Newton expanded and improved on Aristotle's explanation by figuring out a mathematical expression for the gravitational force between two objects, and by identifying the force which causes apples to fall like the same force that keeps planets in their orbits. In the book, Let Newton be!, by John Fauvel, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland and Robin Wilson, they say, “Having first derived gravitational forces, Newton described how he had gone on to show how they could be used to explain the motions of the planets, the Moon and the tides” (Fauvel, Flood, Shortland and Wilson 30). Newton crossed boundaries many people would never have thought of crossing during this time period. How certain things worked, such as gravity, was unknown to many people during the Renaissance time period. If it was not for Newton, our life today would be very different because gravity plays an

Calculus is widely used today, such as in high school and college math classes. This discovery was the best mathematical achievement of the Scientific Revolution. He also did important work on the classification of cubic forms. Aspects of John Wallis's "method of indivisibles" inspired him to invent new methods for solving the problems of quadratures and tangents of curves, which is now what we know as the calculus. Calculus is a set of powerful analytical techniques, such as differentiation and integration, that utilize concepts of rate and limit to describe functions. Newton’s discovery of Calculus impacted the Renaissance because without it during this time period, it would not have expanded to what it is known for today. Without it during this time, jobs now would be very different, such as in engineering and medical fields. Berlinski described Calculus in the book Newton’s Gift as “in one audacious intellectual act, time and space find themselves subordinated to the same system of numbers” (Berlinski 43). Newton first published the Principles of Calculus, the Mathematics of Change in 1666. The book Let Newton be! says that, “The direction of Newton’s work was set in his early twenties. It was then that he developed his ideas about algebra and infinite series” (Fauvel, Flood, Shortland, and Wilson 63). In 1677 Newton went back to Cambridge University as a fellow professor