Colorized portrait of Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 - March 20, 1727), an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian. His monograph Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica , published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours that form the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed Newton's method |