Sir Isaac Newton Research Paper

Sir Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton was an eccentric, surly and often distant character. However, despite these unsavory qualities and even his rather mystic understanding of some phenomena in the natural world, he was still a highly important figure in the Scientific Revolution and was even, as Westfall stated, “the leading mathematician in Europe” by the tender age of 27 (Sir Isaac Newton). Isaac Newton was born to Hannah Ascough and Isaac Newton, Senior, in the town of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England on the twenty-fifth of December, in 1642. His father had died three months before his birth, which was a source of family strife for most of his childhood. His mother’s second husband, who Isaac vehemently disliked, split Isaac and his mother

Naturally, he studied science, and approached it from both the perspective of those participating in the Scientific Revolution and that of a Hermetic natural philosopher. The latter was to surface again later in his career. However, at this age, his larger body of work would be mathematics. After learning what there was to know at the time of geometry and algebra and analytical mathematics, he branched out into previously uncharted waters and developed both calculus and the binomial theorem, effectively altering the course of mathematics forever. He published his findings in 1669, in De Analysi per Aequations Numeri Terminorium Infinitas and two years later in an edited version of that paper, entitled De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum

He was not a gracious acceptor of criticism and would have immense fallings-out with many critics, mainly a fellow scientist, Robert Hooke, and British Jesuit scientists. These unpleasant encounters, coupled with the death of his mother, would cause him to draw away from the rest of the scientific community (and the rest of the world) for a period of roughly six years. During this period of isolation, he would revert to investigating natural phenomena through the lens of Hermetic philosophy, applying less-than-scientific, almost magical, explanations to certain happenings, taking it as seriously as he took calculus (Westfall). He would also take to practicing alchemy, which became another way to explain the composition and qualities of matter (Gleick). Newton began honing his theories regarding gravity and made great strides in this process. It was brought on by the sighting of Halley’s Comet and the ensuing mad rush to understand the path in which it travelled and why. The deliberating would turn to debate between Newton and his old nemesis, Hooke. Eventually, Newton would publish “On the Motion of Bodies in Orbit”, his explanation of planetary motion. For this treatise, he coined the term mass to represent how much matter one was referencing, and force to quantify motion. He also used centripetal force in these