Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire in 1643, after his father's death; when his mother remarried he was brought up by his grandmother. While he was a student at Cambridge the university closed because of the plague, and at home, in a year and a half, he invented the calculus, split white light with a prism and began to think about universal gravitation, prompted, it is said, by a falling apple. At twenty-six he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. In 1687, urged and financed by his friend Halley, he published the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. He later became Master of the Royal Mint and President of the Royal Society, and was knighted. He said: 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.'