Isaac Newton

1642-1727. Came from humble origins, went to Cambridge and staid there as don. Famous as the leading scientist of his age, writing on optics, mathematics, the laws of gravity. President of the Royal Society. Alexander Pope expressed the admiration of society for Newton thus:

“Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night;

God said Let Newton be! and all was Light.” (Quoted in Sambrook 1986: 2)

Many people popularised Newton’s ideas in the 18th century. There were public lectures on science in coffee-houses. Addison wrote about Newton in his famous weekly journal The Spectator. There was even a Newton for Ladies.

Sources:

Oxford Companion to English Literature.

James Sambrook. The Eighteenth Century. The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700-1789. London: Longman, 1986.

One of Newton's most important achievements was the establishment of the differential calculation. Concerning this issue, people are still quarelling whether this method was invented first by Newton or the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).Actually, they created it independent of each other (though at roughly the same time). However, in his Philosophia naturalis principa mathematica from 1687, Newton deduced his revolutionary findings on the laws of mechanics via average geometrics instead of differential calculation for fear that this new and still unknown method of calculation might hinder his readers even more from accepting his results.

In 1696, Charles Montagu, Lord Halifax, attained that Newton became Warden of the Mint. Circumstances prevented this employment to be no more than a sinecure: due to the growing problem of conterfeiting, Parliament decided to coin the English currency completely anew. Eventually, Newton introduced