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 4 January (25 December old calendar) at Woolsthorpe, a farm, in Lincolnshire. Woolsthorpe is where he worked on his theory of light and optics. This is also believed to be where Newton observed an apple falling from a tree, inspiring him to formulate his law of universal gravitation. He entered Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667 and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He remained at the university, lecturing most of the years, until 1696. Of these years in Cambridge, he was at the height of his creative powers. published in 1665-1666 as "the best period of my age for inventions". Over the course of two or three years of intense mental effort, he prepared Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica commonly known as the Principia, although this was not published until 1687. An opponent of King James II's attempt to transform the universities into Catholic institutions, Newton was elected Member of Parliament for Cambridge University in the Convention Parliament of 1689 and sat again in 1701-1702. Meanwhile, in 1696 he moved to London as Director of the Royal Mint. He became Master of the Mint in 1699, a position he held until his death. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of London in 1671 and became its president in 1703, being 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 more and more accepted on the continent, and especially after a general peace was re-established in 171... halfway through the document... two men, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who he developed the foundations independently. Although both were involved in its creation, they thought about the basic concepts in very different ways. While Newton considered the variables to change over time, Leibniz thought that the variables x and y extended over sequences of infinitely close values. Leibniz knew that dy/dx gives the tangent but 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 came to mind that day. As a result, much of the notation used today in calculus is due to Leibniz.