Biography of Isaac Newton

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Sir Isaac Newton

On Christmas day of 1642 there was real joy to the word. Untapped joy due to the fact that the source was merely a premature newborn by the name of Isaac Newton. The world did not know of the knowledge that they would obtain, the immense contribution to math and science he would give, but they got a huge present that Christmas day in Woolsthorpe.

Biography

Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642 in Woolsthorpe, a small town near Grantham in Lincolnshire. He was fatherless and his mother casted him away to live with his grandmother before he was even 3 years old. So, she could remarry and try to have another life without him. Several years later his mother came back once her second husband died. Newton was not fully recovered from him mother’s neglect of the years. Newton’s childhood was not cheerful at all. Newton’s personality had been distorted. He became distrustful, uncertain when dealing with others, and emotionally unstable. These would be lifelong traits attributing to breakdowns Newton had is his latter life.

When Newton was 11 his mother took him out of school so that he could be like his deceased father, a farmer. Farming however was not his strong suit, which was great news for us. If he had taken the road of agriculture we may not have had the discoveries we have today. So he stopped farming and went back to King’s School at Graham. The intelligent Newton we know off today was not present in his earlier days of school. He was scatterbrained and had nothing special about him and his schoolwork. But, he was able to undergo a tremendous change in his life when he went to attend Cambridge University.

At Cambridge as an undergraduate he was in private study with Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor...

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...face. He chose a spherical shape for his mirror instead of a parabola to simplify construction; even though it would introduce spherical aberration, it would still correct chromatic aberration. He added to his reflector what is the trademark of the design of a Newtonian telescope, a secondary diagonally mounted mirror near the primary mirror's focus to reflect the image at a 90° angle to an eyepiece mounted on the side of the telescope. This unique addition allowed the image to be viewed with little impediment of the objective mirror. He also made the tube, mount, and fittings. Newton's first version had a primary mirror diameter of 1.3 inches (33 mm) and a focal ratio of f/5. He found that the telescope worked without color distortion and that he could see the four Galilean moons of Jupiter and the crescent phase of the planet Venus with it.

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