Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician,
astronomer, inventor, philosopher and alchemist. A man of profound
genius, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential
scientists in history. He is associated with the scientific
revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism. Among his
scientific accomplishments, Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, wherein he described universal gravitation
and, via his laws of motion, laid the groundwork for classical
mechanics. With Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz he shares credit for the
development of differential calculus. Newton was the first to
promulgate a set of natural laws that could govern both terrestrial
motion and celestial motion, and is credited with providing
mathematical substantiation for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion,
which he expanded by arguing that orbits (such as those of comets)
could include all conic sections (such as the ellipse, hyperbola,
and parabola).
