Newton and the Mathematical Laws of Nature

Isaac Newton (1642-1727), born at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire and later Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, produced in the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) what many historians consider the single most important work of the Scientific Revolution. Written in Latin and cast in a rigorously geometric style modeled on Euclid, the Principia was urged into existence and personally financed for publication by the astronomer Edmond Halley, after Halley found that Newton had already privately worked out that an inverse-square force would produce elliptical orbits, exactly as Kepler had described empirically decades earlier.