The life and works of Sir Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, was one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. Sir Isaac Newton was born on January 4 (old calendar December 25) at Woolsthorpe, a farm in Lincolnshire. Woolsthorpe is where he worked on his theory of light and optics. It is also believed to be where Newton observed an apple falling from a tree, which inspired him to develop his law of universal gravitation. He entered Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected Fellow of Trinity College in 1667 and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He remained at the university, lecturing most years, until 1696. During these years at Cambridge he was at the top of his creative power, he chose 1665-1666 as "the golden age of my age for invention". During two to three years of intense mental effort, he prepared the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, commonly called Principia, although this was not published until 1687. As an opponent of King James II's attempt to establish the universities as Catholic institutions, Newton was elected MP for Cambridge University in the Conventional Parliament of 1689 and sat again in 1701–02. Meanwhile, in 1696, he moved to London as director of the Royal Mint. He became master of the Mint in 1699, a position he retained until his death. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1671 and in 1703 he became president, re-elected every year for the rest of his life. His major work, Opticks, appeared the following year; he was knighted at Cambridge in 1705. As Newtonian science became increasingly accepted on the continent, and especially after general peace was restored in 171...... middle of paper ..... . two men, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who developed its foundations independently. Although they both participated in its creation, they thought about the basic concepts in very different ways. While Newton viewed variables as changing over time, Leibniz viewed the variables x and y as spanning infinitely close sequences of values. Leibniz knew that dy/dx gives the tangent but he did not use it as a determining property. On the other hand, Newton used the quantities x' and y', which were fixed speeds, to find the tangent. Leibniz was very aware of the importance of good details and put a lot of thought into the symbols he used. Newton, on the other hand, wrote more for himself than for anyone else. As a result, he tended to use whatever notation he thought of that day. As a result, much of the notation used in calculus today is due to Leibniz..