Sir Isaac Newton, English mathematician and physicist, 1727.

Engraving from Sir David Brewster's 'Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton', 1855, after Roubilliac's death mask. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1665, becoming Lucasian Profesor of Mathematics there in 1669. His theories, published in his treatise 'The Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy' in 1687, exerted a huge influence on science. They included the three laws of motion, the theory of gravitation and the law of cooling. As a mathematican, Newton also discovered the binomial theorem and differential calculus. His work was unique, pointing physics in a new direction and giving mathematical expresion to physical phenomena.