Sir Isaac Newton was born January 4, 1643. At the age of three, he was taken under the care of his grandmother. Newton, however, was never a very good student, so when he was a teenager, his mother pulled him from school to work on the farm to train him as a successful farmer. She saw that he very clever and that he had more important talents than farming, so she sent him to Cambridge University at the age of eighteen. There he learned much about science and mathematics and began to formulate some early theories about mathematics. Immediately after his graduation when he was 21, he began to independent research in the fields of natural philosophy and mathematics. Natural philosophy wa ...view middle of the document...
He discovered that light is really just a mixture of all colors. He also studied the laws of reflection and refraction. Using those rules, he created the world's first reflecting telescope in 1668. He demonstrated the theory that white light was really a mixture of lights by passing them light through a prism and creating a spectrum. In 1672, Newton presented his theories to the Royal Society. However, it received many criticisms that he was afraid of, so he withdrew into his Cambridge study to continue his works. Although his works in the field of optics were important, however his work in mathematics and mechanics were much more important. Had calculus never been created, many future advances in modern mathematics and science could not be possible. The most important discovery of Newton's life however was the laws of gravity and mechanics, the science of how material objects move. The first law of motion was discovered by not Newton but by Galileo. It describes the motion of objects if they are not subjected to exterior forces. One of the most important questions in mechanics is how objects move under such circumstances. The second law of motion, formulated by Newton, is considered the Golden Rule of Motion. It states that the acceleration of an object is equal to the net force on the object divided by the object's mass (F=ma). The third law is that for each action, there is an equal and opposite action. The fourth law was the law of universal gravitation. Together, these four ru...
