SIR ISAAC NEWTON

GROUP 2 :

MEMBERS:
Alliah Bonghanoy

Rupert Lee

Samuel Glorioso

Russel Antonio

Lawrence Octavio
BIOGRAPHY OF ISAAC NEWTON
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), English natural philosopher, generally regarded as the most
original and influential theorist in the history of science. In addition to his invention of the
infinitesimal calculus and a new theory of light and color, Newton transformed the structure
of physical science with his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. As the
keystone of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, Newton's work combined the
contributions of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and others into a new and powerful
synthesis. Three centuries later the resulting structure - classical mechanics - continues to
be a useful but no less elegant monument to his genius.

Life & Character - Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas day 1642 (4 January
1643, New Style) in Woolsthorpe, a hamlet near Grantham in Lincolnshire. The posthumous
son of an illiterate yeoman (also named Isaac), the fatherless infant was small enough at
birth to fit 'into a quartpot.' When he was barely three years old Newton's mother, Hanna
(Ayscough), placed her first born with his grandmother in order to remarry and raise a
second family with Barnabas Smith, a wealthy rector from nearby North Witham. Much has
been made of Newton's posthumous birth, his prolonged separation from his mother, and his
unrivaled hatred of his stepfather. Until Hanna returned to Woolsthorpe in 1653 after the
death of her second husband, Newton was denied his mother's attention, a possible clue to
his complex character. Newton's childhood was anything but happy, and throughout his life
he verged on emotional collapse, occasionally falling into violent and vindictive attacks
against friend and foe alike.

With his mother's return to Woolsthorpe in 1653, Newton was taken from school to fulfill
his birthright as a farmer. Happily, he failed in this calling, and returned to King's School at
Grantham to prepare for entrance to Trinity College, Cambridge. Numerous anecdotes
survive from this period about Newton's absent-mindedness as a fledging farmer and his
lackluster performance as a student. But the turning point in Newton's life came in June
1661 when he left Woolsthorpe for Cambridge University. Here Newton entered a new world,
one he could eventually call his own.

Although Cambridge was an outstanding center of learning, the spirit of the scientific
revolution had yet to penetrate its ancient and somewhat ossified curriculum. Little is known
of Newton's formal studies as an undergraduate, but he likely received large doses of
Aristotle as well as other classical authors. And by all appearances his academic performance
was undistinguished. In 1664 Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at
Cambridge, examined Newton's understanding of Euclid and found it sorely lacking. We now
know that during his undergraduate years Newton was deeply engrossed in private study,
that he privately mastered the works of René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes,
and other major figures of the scientific revolution. A series of extant notebooks shows
that by 1664 Newton had begun to master Descartes' Géométrie and other forms of
mathematics far in advance of Euclid's Elements. Barrow, himself a gifted mathematician,
had yet to appreciate Newton's genius.

In 1665 Newton took his bachelor's degree at Cambridge without honors or distinction.
Since the university was closed for the next two years because of plague, Newton returned
to Woolsthorpe in midyear. There, in the following 18 months, he made a series of original
contributions to science. As he later recalled, 'All this was in the two plague years of 1665
and 1666, for in those days I was in my prime of age for invention, and minded mathematics
and philosophy more than at any time since.' In mathematics Newton conceived his 'method
of fluxions' (infinitesimal calculus), laid the foundations for his theory of light and color,
and achieved significant insight into the problem of planetary motion, insights that
eventually led to the publication of his Principia (1687).

In April 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge and, against stiff odds, was elected a minor
fellow at Trinity. Success followed good fortune. In the next year he became a senior fellow
upon taking his master of arts degree, and in 1669, before he had reached his 27th birthday,
he succeeded Isaac Barrow as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The duties of this
appointment offered Newton the opportunity to organize the results of his earlier optical
researches, and in 1672, shortly after his election to the Royal Society, he communicated
his first public paper, a brilliant but no less controversial study on the nature of color.

In 1678, Newton suffered a serious emotional breakdown, and in the following year his
mother died. Newton's response was to cut off contact with others and engross himself in
alchemical research. These studies, once an embarrassment to Newton scholars, were not
misguided musings but rigorous investigations into the hidden forces of nature. Newton's
alchemical studies opened theoretical avenues not found in the mechanical philosophy, the
world view that sustained his early work. While the mechanical philosophy reduced all
phenomena to the impact of matter in motion, the alchemical tradition upheld the possibility
of attraction and repulsion at the particulate level. Newton's later insights in celestial
mechanics can be traced in part to his alchemical interests. By combining action-at-a-
distance and mathematics, Newton transformed the mechanical philosophy by adding a
mysterious but no less measurable quantity, gravitational force.

In 1666, as tradition has it, Newton observed the fall of an apple in his garden at
Woolsthorpe, later recalling, 'In the same year I began to think of gravity extending to the
orb of the Moon.' Newton's memory was not accurate. In fact, all evidence suggests that
the concept of universal gravitation did not spring full-blown from Newton's head in 1666
but was nearly 20 years in gestation. Ironically, Robert Hooke helped give it life. In
November 1679, Hooke initiated an exchange of letters that bore on the question of
planetary motion. Although Newton hastily broke off the correspondence, Hooke's letters
provided a conceptual link between central attraction and a force falling off with the square
of distance. Sometime in early 1680, Newton appears to have quietly drawn his own
conclusions.

Although his creative years had passed, Newton continued to exercise a profound influence
on the development of science. In effect, the Royal Society was Newton's instrument, and
he played it to his personal advantage. His tenure as president has been described as
tyrannical and autocratic, and his control over the lives and careers of younger disciples was
all but absolute. Newton could not abide contradiction or controversy - his quarrels with
Hooke provide singular examples. But in later disputes, as president of the Royal Society,
Newton marshaled all the forces at his command. For example, he published Flamsteed's
astronomical observations - the labor of a lifetime - without the author's permission; and in
his priority dispute with Leibniz concerning the calculus, Newton enlisted younger men to
fight his war of words, while behind the lines he secretly directed charge and
countercharge. In the end, the actions of the Society were little more than extensions of
Newton's will, and until his death he dominated the landscape of science without rival. He
died in London on March 20, 1727.
 Contribution of Isaac Newton in Mathematics

CALCULUS
Isaac Newton and his Contributions to Mathematics

In class we discussed the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and how Isaac Newton
contributed to it, but what other discoveries did he make?

Sir Isacc Newton was born on January 4, 1643, but in England they used the Julian Calender
at that time and his birthday was on Christmas Day 1642. He was born in Woolsthorpe-by-
Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. His father had already passed prior to
his birth and his mother remarried after his birth and left Isaac to live with her mother.
He went to The King’s School, Grantham from the time he was twelve until he was seventeen.
His mother removed him from school after the death of her second husband, but later
allowed him to return by the encouragement of the school’s headmaster. He rose to be at
the top in rankings in his school, mainly motivated to get revenge towards a bully. He began
attending Trinity College in Cambridge in 1661. After receiving his degree he developed his
theories on calculus over the span of two years during the plague .

Newton’s work in calculus intitially started as a way to find the slope at any point on a curve
whose slope was constantly varying (the slope of a tangent line to the curve at any point).
He calculated the derivative in order to find the slope. He called this the “method of
fluxions” rather than differentiation. That is because he termed “fluxion” as the
instantaneous rate of change at a point on the curve and “fluents” as the changing values of
x and y. He then established that the opposite of differentiation is integration, which he
called the “method of fluents”. This allowed him to create the First Fundamental Theorem
of Calculus, which states that if a function is integrated and then differentiated the original
function can be obtained because differentiation and integration are inverse functions .

Controversy later arose over who developed calculus. Newton didn’t publish anything about
calculus until 1693, but German mathematician Leibniz published his own version of the
theory in 1684. The Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism in 1699 and the dispute
caused a scandal to occur in 1711 when the Royal Society claimed Newton was the real
discoverer of calculus. The scandal got worse when it was discovered that the accusations
against Leibniz were actually written by Newton. The dispute between Newton and Leibniz
went on until the death of Leibniz. It is now believed that both developed the theories of
Calculus independently, both with very different notations. It should also be noted that
Newton actually developed his Fundamental Theory of Calculus between 1665 and 1667, but
waited to publish his works due to fear of being criticized and causing controversy [1].

Newton not only discovered calculus but he is also credited for the discovery of the
generalised binomial theorem. This theorem describes the algebraic expansion of powers of
a binomial. He also contributed to the theory of finite differences, he used fractional
exponents and coordinate geometry to get solutions to Diophantine equations, he developed
a method for finding better approximation to the zeroes or roots of a function, and he was
the first to use infinite power series.

His work and discoveries were not limited to mathematics; he also developed theories in
optics and gravitation. He observed that prisms refract different colors at different angles,
which led him to conclude that color is a property intrinsic to light. He developed his theory
of color by noting that regardless if colored light was reflected, scattered, or transmitted
it remained the same color. Therefore color is the result of objects interacting with colored
light and objects do not generate their own colors themselves [1].
Sir Isaac Newton was a truly amazing mathematician and scientist. He achieved so much in
his lifetime and the amount of discoveries he made can seem almost impossible. He helped
make huge advancements in mathematics and created theorems that we still use heavily to
this day.

Newton completed no definitive publication formalizing his fluxional calculus; rather, many
of his mathematical discoveries were transmitted through correspondence, smaller papers
or as embedded aspects in his other definitive compilations, such as the Principia and
Opticks. Newton would begin his mathematical training as the chosen heir of Isaac Barrow
in Cambridge. His aptitude was recognized early and he quickly learned the current theories.
By 1664 Newton had made his first important contribution by advancing the binomial
theorem, which he had extended to include fractional and negative exponents. Newton
succeeded in expanding the applicability of the binomial theorem by applying the algebra of
finite quantities in an analysis of infinite series. He showed a willingness to view infinite
series not only as approximate devices, but also as alternative forms of expressing a term.

Many of Newton's critical insights occurred during the plague years of 1665–1666[21] which
he later described as, "the prime of my age for invention and minded mathematics and
[natural] philosophy more than at any time since." It was during his plague-induced isolation
that the first written conception of fluxionary calculus was recorded in the unpublished De
Analysi per Aequationes Numero Terminorum Infinitas. In this paper, Newton determined
the area under a curve by first calculating a momentary rate of change and then
extrapolating the total area. He began by reasoning about an indefinitely small triangle
whose area is a function of x and y. He then reasoned that the infinitesimal increase in the
abscissa will create a new formula where x = x + o (importantly, o is the letter, not the digit
0). He then recalculated the area with the aid of the binomial theorem, removed all
quantities containing the letter o and re-formed an algebraic expression for the area.
Significantly, Newton would then “blot out” the quantities containing o because terms
"multiplied by it will be nothing in respect to the rest".

At this point Newton had begun to realize the central property of inversion. He had created
an expression for the area under a curve by considering a momentary increase at a point. In
effect, the fundamental theorem of calculus was built into his calculations. While his new
formulation offered incredible potential, Newton was well aware of its logical limitations at
the time. He admits that "errors are not to be disregarded in mathematics, no matter how
small" and that what he had achieved was “shortly explained rather than accurately
demonstrated."

In an effort to give calculus a more rigorous explication and framework, Newton compiled in
1671 the Methodus Fluxionum et Serierum Infinitarum. In this book, Newton's strict
empiricism shaped and defined his fluxional calculus. He exploited instantaneous motion and
infinitesimals informally. He used math as a methodological tool to explain the physical world.
The base of Newton’s revised calculus became continuity; as such he redefined his
calculations in terms of continual flowing motion. For Newton, variable magnitudes are not
aggregates of infinitesimal elements, but are generated by the indisputable fact of motion.
As with many of his works, Newton delayed publication. Methodus Fluxionum was not
published until 1736.

Newton attempted to avoid the use of the infinitesimal by forming calculations based on
ratios of changes. In the Methodus Fluxionum he defined the rate of generated change as
a fluxion, which he represented by a dotted letter, and the quantity generated he defined

Newton's generalized binomial theorem

where =k is the Pochhammer symbol, here standing for a falling factorial. This agrees with
the usual definitions when r is a nonnegative integer. Then, if x and y are real numbers with
|x| > |y|, and r is any complex number, one has

When r is a nonnegative integer, the binomial coefficients for k > r are zero, so this equation
reduces to the usual binomial theorem, and there are at most r + 1 nonzero terms. For other
values of r, the series typically has infinitely many nonzero terms.

For example, r = 1/2 gives the following series for the square root:

Taking r=-1 ,the generalized binomial series gives the geometric series formula, valid for
|x|<1

More generally, with r = −s:

So, for instance when s=1/2

Further generalizations

The generalized binomial theorem can be extended to the case where x and y are complex
numbers. For this version, one should again assume x > y and define the powers of x + y and
x using a holomorphic branch of log defined on an open disk of radius |x| centered at x. The
generalized binomial theorem is valid also for elements x and y of a Banach algebra as long
as xy = yx, x is invertible, and ||y/x|| < 1.

A version of the binomial theorem is valid for the following Pochhammer symbol-like family
of polynomials: for a given real constant c, define

and . Then

The case c = 0 recovers the usual binomial theorem.

More generally, a sequence of polynomials is said to be binomial if

An operator Q on the space of polynomials is said to be the basis operator of the sequence
if and for all n > 1. A sequence is binomial if and only if its
basis operator is a Delta operator. Writing. for the shift by a operator, the Delta
operators corresponding to the above "Pochhammer" families of polynomials are the
backward difference for c > 0 , the ordinary derivative for c = 0 , and the forward
difference for c < 0