Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution.

His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, established classical mechanics.

His work on light was collected in his highly influential book Opticks, published in 1704.

He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 and spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696–1699) and Master (1699–1727) of the Royal Mint, as well as president of the Royal Society (1703–1727).

Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar, in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (NS 4 January 1643) "an hour or two after midnight", at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire.

He was removed from school and returned to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth by October 1659.

In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, on the recommendation of his uncle Rev William Ayscough, who had studied there.

He started as a subsizar—paying his way by performing valet's duties—until he was awarded a scholarship in 1664, guaranteeing him four more years until he could get his MA.

In 1665, he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus.

Soon after Newton had obtained his BA degree in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague.

In April 1667, he returned to Cambridge and in October was elected as a fellow of Trinity.

His studies had impressed the Lucasian professor Isaac Barrow, who was more anxious to develop his own religious and administrative potential (he became master of Trinity two years later); in 1669 Newton succeeded him, only one year after receiving his MA.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1672.

The author of the manuscript De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas, sent by Isaac Barrow to John Collins in June 1669, was identified by Barrow in a letter sent to Collins in August of that year as " of an extraordinary genius and proficiency in these things.

Occasionally it has been suggested that Newton published almost nothing about it until 1693, and did not give a full account until 1704, while Leibniz began publishing a full account of his methods in 1684.

Leibniz's notation and "differential Method", nowadays recognised as much more convenient notations, were adopted by continental European mathematicians, and after 1820 or so, also by British mathematicians.

His use of methods involving "one or more orders of the infinitesimally small" is present in his De motu corporum in gyrum of 1684 and in his papers on motion "during the two decades preceding 1684".

In 1691, Duillier started to write a new version of Newton's Principia, and corresponded with Leibniz.

In 1693, the relationship between Duillier and Newton deteriorated and the book was never completed.

Starting in 1699, other members of the Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism.

The dispute then broke out in full force in 1711 when the Royal Society proclaimed in a study that it was Newton who was the true discoverer and labelled Leibniz a fraud; it was later found that Newton wrote the study's concluding remarks on Leibniz.

When Newton received his MA and became a Fellow of the "College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity" in 1667, he made the commitment that "I will either set Theology as the object of my studies and will take holy orders when the time prescribed by these statutes arrives, or I will resign from the college.

He was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669, on Barrow's recommendation.

In 1666, Newton observed that the spectrum of colours exiting a prism in the position of minimum deviation is oblong, even when the light ray entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colours by different angles.

From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics.

In late 1668, he was able to produce this first reflecting telescope.

In 1671, the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope.

In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles.

In 1704, Newton published Opticks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light.

In 1679, Newton returned to his work on celestial mechanics by considering gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets with reference to Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Newton communicated his results to Edmond Halley and to the Royal Society in De motu corporum in gyrum, a tract written on about nine sheets which was copied into the Royal Society's Register Book in December 1684.

The Principia was published on 5 July 1687 with encouragement and financial help from Edmond Halley.

Newton made clear his heliocentric view of the Solar System—developed in a somewhat modern way because already in the mid-1680s he recognised the "deviation of the Sun" from the centre of gravity of the Solar System.

Later, in the second edition of the Principia (1713), Newton firmly rejected such criticisms in a concluding General Scholium, writing that it was enough that the phenomena implied a gravitational attraction, as they did; but they did not so far indicate its cause, and it was both unnecessary and improper to frame hypotheses of things that were not implied by the phenomena.

In 1717, and probably with Newton's help, James Stirling proved that every cubic was one of these four types.

Newton also claimed that the four types could be obtained by plane projection from one of them, and this was proved in 1731, four years after his death.

In the 1690s, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal and symbolic interpretation of the Bible.

A manuscript Newton sent to John Locke in which he disputed the fidelity of 1 John 5:7—the Johannine Comma—and its fidelity to the original manuscripts of the New Testament, remained unpublished until 1785.Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England for Cambridge University in 1689 and 1701, but according to some accounts his only comments were to complain about a cold draught in the chamber and request that the window be closed.

Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life.

He retired from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercised his authority to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters.

Then he conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699.

Newton was made President of the Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the French Académie des Sciences.

In April 1705, Queen Anne knighted Newton during a royal visit to Trinity College, Cambridge.

The knighthood is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton's scientific work or services as Master of the Mint.

As a result of a report written by Newton on 21 September 1717 to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury, the bimetallic relationship between gold coins and silver coins was changed by Royal proclamation on 22 December 1717, forbidding the exchange of gold guineas for more than 21 silver shillings.

Newton was invested in the South Sea Company and lost some £20,000 (£4.4 million in 2020) when it collapsed in around 1720.Toward the end of his life, Newton took up residence at Cranbury Park, near Winchester with his niece and her husband, until his death in 1727.

Their relationship came to an abrupt and unexplained end in 1693, and at the same time Newton suffered a nervous breakdown which included sending wild accusatory letters to his friends Samuel Pepys and John Locke—his note to the latter included the charge that Locke "endeavoured to embroil me with woemen".

In 2015, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, called Newton "a nasty antagonist" and "a bad man to have as an enemy".

Newton was relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676, stating "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

On the other hand, the widely known proverb about standing on the shoulders of giants, published among others by seventeenth-century poet George Herbert (a former orator of the University of Cambridge and fellow of Trinity College) in his Jacula Prudentum (1651), had as its main point that "a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two", and so its effect as an analogy would place Newton himself rather than Hooke as the 'dwarf'.

In 1816, a tooth said to have belonged to Newton was sold for £730 (US$3,633) in London to an aristocrat who had it set in a ring.

Guinness World Records 2002 classified it as the most valuable tooth, which would value approximately £25,000 (US$35,700) in late 2001.

In a 2005 survey of members of Britain's Royal Society (formerly headed by Newton) asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Einstein, the members deemed Newton to have made the greater overall contribution.

In 1999, an opinion poll of 100 of the day's leading physicists voted Einstein the "greatest physicist ever," with Newton the runner-up, while a parallel survey of rank-and-file physicists by the site PhysicsWeb gave the top spot to Newton.

Newton's monument (1731) can be seen in Westminster Abbey, at the north of the entrance to the choir against the choir screen, near his tomb.

He was born on 25 December 1642, and died on 20 March 1726/7.—Translation from G.L. Smyth, The Monuments and Genii of St. Paul's Cathedral, and of Westminster Abbey (1826), ii, 703–704.

From 1978 until 1988, an image of Newton designed by Harry Ecclestone appeared on Series D £1 banknotes issued by the Bank of England (the last £1 notes to be issued by the Bank of England).

A large bronze statue, Newton, after William Blake, by Eduardo Paolozzi, dated 1995 and inspired by Blake's etching, dominates the piazza of the British Library in London.

By 1672, he had started to record his theological researches in notebooks which he showed to no one and which have only recently been examined.

At the last moment in 1675 he received a dispensation from the government that excused him and all future holders of the Lucasian chair.

In 1999, historian Stephen D. Snobelen wrote, "Isaac Newton was a heretic.

In a manuscript he wrote in 1704 (never intended to be published), he mentions the date of 2060, but it is not given as a date for the end of days.

So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a year & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calender of the primitive year.

And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived kingdoms the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end 2060.

In the character of Morton Opperly in "Poor Superman" (1951), speculative fiction author Fritz Leiber says of Newton, "Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist.

In 1888, after spending sixteen years cataloguing Newton's papers, Cambridge University kept a small number and returned the rest to the Earl of Portsmouth.

In 1936, a descendant offered the papers for sale at Sotheby's.

June 2020, two unpublished pages of Newton's notes on Jan Baptist van Helmont's book on plague, De Peste, were being auctioned online by Bonham's.

Newton's analysis of this book, which he made in Cambridge while protecting himself from London's 1665-1666 infection, is the most substantial written statement he is known to have made about the plague, according to Bonham's.

Voltaire then wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), "Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree."

Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity at any single moment, acquaintances of Newton (such as William Stukeley, whose manuscript account of 1752 has been made available by the Royal Society) do in fact confirm the incident, though not the apocryphal version that the apple actually hit Newton's head.

Stukeley recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726:

In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire.

It is known from his notebooks that Newton was grappling in the late 1660s with the idea that terrestrial gravity extends, in an inverse-square proportion, to the Moon; however, it took him two decades to develop the full-fledged theory.

De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas (1669, published 1711) Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation (unpublished, c. 1671–75) De motu corporum in gyrum (1684)

Observations on Daniel and The Apocalypse of St. John (1733) Method of Fluxions (1671, published 1736)

Descartes, Space, and Body and A New Theory of Light and Colour, modernised readable versions by Jonathan Bennett Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, full text on archive.org "Newton Papers" – Cambridge Digital Library (1686) "