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 first invented by Newton or the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) (actually, they created it independent of each other). 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 Montague, 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 that coins should be coinaged also at the brim, which would make counterfeiting almost impossible. Different biographers are astonished that a chaotic person like Newton (who was used to keep irregukar hours and slept only of overpowered by fatigue) showed such an organizing ability in his office as a Warden. In 1700, after very successive trials against several forgerers, Newton was appointed Master of the Mint. He hold this office until his death in 1727.

Sources: David Berlinski: Der Apfel der Erkenntnis. Sir Isaac Newton und die Entschlüsselung des Universums. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 2002. Richard Westfall: Never at a rest. A biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge UP 1986.