Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) attended Trinity College, Cambridge, before returning to Woolsthorpe during the Great Plague of 1665–1666. In this legendary 'Annus Mirabilis', watching an apple fall in his mother's orchard, he conceived universal gravitation, differential calculus, and the spectral decomposition of white light through a glass prism.

Encouraged by Edmond Halley, Newton published his monumental Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, uniting heaven and earth under the three universal laws of motion and the inverse-square law of gravity ($F = G frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}$). In his 1704 Opticks, he detailed his invention of the reflecting telescope. Knighted by Queen Anne in 1705, he presided over the Royal Society until his death.