BORN: Christmas Day 1642
PLACE: United kindom
DIED: March 31, 1727
PLACE: United Kingdom(Loondon)
Those two years were amazingly productive for at that time he made four of his major discoveries:
(1)His representation of function as a sums of infinite
series, including the binomial theorem
(2)His work on differential and integral calculus
(3)His law of motion and law of gravitation
(4)His prism experiment on the nature of light and color
Because of a fear of controversy and criticism, he was
reluctant to publish his discoveries and it wasn’t until 1687, at the urging of
the astronomer Halley, that newton published “Principia Mathematica”. In this
work, the greatest scientific treatise even written, Newton set forth his version
of calculus and used it to investigate mechanics, fluid dynamics, and wave
motion, and to explain the motion of planets and comets.
The beginnings of calculus are found in the calculations of
areas and volumes by ancient Greek scholars such as Eudoxus and Archimedes.
Although aspects of the idea of a limit are implicit in their “Method of Exhaustion”
Eudoxus and Archimedes never explicitly formulate the concept of a limit.
Likewise, mathematicians such as Cavalieri, Fermat, and Barrow, the immediate
precursors of Newton in the development of calculus, did not actually use
limits. It was Isaac Newton who was the first to talk explicitly about limits.
He explained that the main idea behind limit is the quantities “approaches
nearer than by ant given difference.”
Newton stated that the limit was the basic concept in calculus, but it was left to later mathematicians like Cauchy to clarify his idea about limits.
Newton stated that the limit was the basic concept in calculus, but it was left to later mathematicians like Cauchy to clarify his idea about limits.
