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Isaac Newton Contributions

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Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and physicist, considered one of the greatest scientists in history. He made important contributions to many fields of science. His discoveries and theories laid the foundation for much of the progress in science. Newton was one of the inventors of a mathematics called calculus. He also solved the mysteries of light and optics, formulated the three laws of motion, and derived from them the law of universal gravitation. Newton was born on December 25, 1642, at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. When he was three years old, he was put in care of his Grandmother. He then was sent to grammar school in Grantham. Then later he attended Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Newton ignored much of the established curriculum of the university to pursue his own interests; mathematics and natural philosophy. Proceeding entirely on his own, he investigated the latest developments in mathematics and the new natural philosophy that treated nature as a complicated machine. Almost immediately, still under the age of 25, he made fundamental discoveries that were instrumental in his career science. The Fluxional Method, Newton's first achievement was in mathematics. He generalized the methods that were being used to draw tangents to curves and to calculate the area swept by curves. He recognized that the two procedures were inverse operations. By joining them in what he called the fluxional method,

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