Newton Isaac


New·ton

N0088500 (no͞ot′n, nyo͞ot′n), Sir Isaac 1642-1727. English mathematician and scientist who developed the techniques of calculus and formulated the theory of universal gravitation, a corpuscular theory of light, and three laws of motion. His theory of gravitation, presented in Principia Mathematica (1687), was supposedly inspired by the sight of a falling apple.
New·to′ni·an adj.

Newton

, Sir Isaac 1642-1727. English mathematician and scientist. He invented a form of calculus, and formulated the law of universal gravitation, a theory about the nature of light, and three laws of motion. His treatise on gravitation, presented in Principia Mathematica (1687), was in his own account inspired by the sight of a falling apple.Biography Isaac Newton's college classes were suspended for a time in 1665 because of an outbreak of the plague. During his days away from school, Newton conducted his own studies. Light was one of the things he was interested in, and his experiments with prisms led him to prove that white light contains all the colors of the spectrum. He also conducted studies of gravity. It was during this time that he made his famous observation of an apple falling from a tree, leading him to realize that the force of gravity acting on the apple was the same force that caused the moon to remain in orbit around Earth. Newton would go on to define the nature of mass, weight, force, inertia, and acceleration. Perhaps Newton's greatest achievement was to demonstrate that scientific principles have universal applications and have the power to predict what will happen under a given set of conditions.