Isaac Newton
Mathematician & Physicist
1643 – 1727 · Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
“He saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art (faithful reproduction of a public-domain painting)
Their life
Isaac Newton was born early and frail on a Lincolnshire farm, a fatherless boy who would grow into perhaps the most powerful mind in the history of science. When plague closed his university, he went home to the countryside and, in two quiet years alone, invented a new mathematics, broke white light into its colors, and began to wonder why the same force that drops an apple might hold the Moon in its orbit.
His Principia Mathematica gave the world its three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation — a single elegant idea that bound the falling apple to the wheeling planets and made the heavens calculable for the first time. He built the first reflecting telescope, co-founded calculus, and spent his later years guarding the King's coinage and chasing mysteries he never published.
For all his genius he called himself only a boy on a seashore, finding a prettier pebble now and then while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. We honor him as the man who taught the universe to obey equations — and who, even at the summit, never stopped feeling small before how much remained unknown.
Known for
- Formulated the three laws of motion and universal gravitation
- Co-invented calculus
- Discovered that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors
- Built the first practical reflecting telescope
- Wrote the Principia Mathematica, a cornerstone of modern science
One piece of advice for the world
Stand on the work of those who came before you, then add your one small stone — that is how the great ocean of truth gets crossed.
Loqal does not own the rights to Isaac Newton. This memorial draws on publicly available, public-domain information and media.