Although none of those goals of his materialized, Newton was still able to produce a number of works on acids. The English scientist burnt the midnight candle, going over many ancient books and texts in a bid find the elixir of life, or some kind of medicine that could keep humans forever young and healthy. Driven by almost the ambition as the alchemists of his days, Newton went on a quest to find the very elusive formula that could turn base metals into gold. Sir Isaac Newton didn’t only devote his time to study of mathematics and physics, but he is said to have studied chemistry as well.

It was groundbreaking in the sense that not only did it magnify the objects by 40 times, but it also removed the colored fringes. At six inches long, the reflecting telescope was the first of its kind. Instead of using mirrors, Newton deployed lenses in building his reflecting telescope in 1668. Newton set out to solve this problem with his reflecting telescope.

The problem, which was known as the “chromatic aberration”, came as a result of glass lenses focusing different colors at different distances. The problem with the refracting telescope was that objects appeared a bit out of focus. The refracting telescope was the dominant telescope during Newton’s time. Classical geometry was insufficient to tackle those problems, including tangents to curves and lengths of curves. Therefore, Newton can be considered as the first to develop the math.Īt the time that he was coming out with Calculus, Newton, like many other mathematicians of his era and the past, did not have the math to handle motion of the planets and their elliptical orbits around the Sun.Ĭalculus, known back then as fluxions, is most useful for measuring continuous state of flux and varying rates of change interlaced with time. Although Leibniz independently developed calculus, it was later revealed that Isaac Newton had started working on the fundamentals of calculus more than a decade before Leibniz even published his works. A number of scientists stated that the credit should go to German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz since he was the first person to publish (in 1684) works on calculus. Isaac Newton is commonly held as the first scientist to discover calculusįor quite some time, there was a very heated debate in the scientific community as to who was the original developer of calculus, the mathematics that allows rates of change, areas or volumes within curved lines or surfaces to be measured. Along with the likes of Rene Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Kepler, Isaac Newton played an unparalleled role during the Scientific Revolution. It can be said without a doubt that Sir Isaac Newton is the greatest scientist of the modern era.

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