Part III: Spotlight on Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)!
Have you heard about the apple that fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head, causing him to be curious about gravity and planetary motion? While that story may not be true, it has sparked curiosity about the universe among young scientists and mathematicians for generations.
As an A Grade Ahead teacher, I am intrigued by Sir Isaac Newton and his world as well, so I set out to explore his contributions to math and physics. From the laws of motion to optics, Newton’s scientific work followed his advancements in our understanding of math.
Is your student curious about the world around them like Sir Isaac Newton? If so, A Grade Ahead’s science curriculum is the perfect way to satisfy that curiosity. Designed for 3rd through 5th grade students, the curriculum introduces students to the scientific method, life science, physical science, and Earth science through a series of lessons and experiments stretching over 16 weeks.
Newton’s Humble Origins
Sir Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England, on December 25, 1643. His father died a few months before his birth. Within two years, his mother and stepfather moved away, leaving him with his grandmother. Although he reunited with his mother after his stepfather’s death, it was a short-lived reunion. She wanted him to manage her estate, but that just wasn’t for him. He was far more interested in reading books and experimenting with models than in managing accounts or cattle. Therefore, he returned to grammar school to prepare for college.
A Grade Ahead can help your child prepare for high school and college math as well! Our High School Math curriculum includes topics from advanced algebra to pre-calculus. Call or visit an A Grade Ahead Academy near you, or take a free assessment and get started today!
Education
Newton matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1661, where he began to study math, chemistry, optics, and more! One of his teachers was Isaac Barrow, who was the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. Barrow was not only a pioneering mathematician in his own right but was responsible for bringing math as a discipline to Cambridge through a series of lectures. At the time, math and science were not considered appropriate topics for college students, but Barrow encouraged Newton and others to explore them beyond the official curriculum.
Is your child interested in math enrichment? A Grade Ahead also challenges students to stretch their understanding of math and the universe, just like Barrow encouraged Newton.
Newton received his bachelor’s degree in 1665. Unfortunately, the deadly plague shut down Cambridge soon thereafter. From 1665 to 1667, Newton was forced to study on his own. This proved to be a fruitful time in his life when he contemplated the universe. It shaped his own ideas about math and physics.
In 1669, when Isaac Barrow retired, Newton became the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and began to publish his work. At that time, though, he was relatively unknown.
Newton and the Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution represented a flowering of European science, math, and engineering. Astronomers like Nicolaus Copernicus and Johanes Kepler had already proposed a heliocentric model of the universe while Galileo was laying out the scientific method we use today. According to this method, scientists ask a specific question and form a hypothesis using previous knowledge. Then, they conduct experiments to prove or disprove their hypothesis. Galileo used this method in 1609 to prove that gravity exerts an equal force on falling objects. Like Galileo, A Grade Ahead science students learn to ask questions, form hypotheses, and conduct experiments!
All of these discoveries and methods encouraged a new belief in a mechanistic universe among European scientists and philosophers. René Descartes, a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, theorized that the physical world is made up of different particles of matter that are constantly in motion. According to this theory, our understanding of the natural world must come from studying how these particles interact with each other. This means that the interactions are knowable and measurable. An incredible, new way of thinking had emerged.
Sir Isaac Newton sought out these ideas in the bookstalls of Cambridge, and they sparked his own ideas about science and math. For example, Newton learned from Pierre Gassendi, another French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, that perhaps the universe is made of particles so tiny that they are invisible. We call these particles atoms. Unlike Descartes, this atomistic view of the world did not differentiate between the particles.
Newton explored these ideas in his first work, Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae or “Certain Philosophical Questions,” which he began in 1664 in the pages of his student notebook.
Newton’s Math
In Quaestiones, Newton also began innovating some of the math that would be required to understand this new mechanistic universe. In particular, he and others pioneered calculus, which studies infinitesimal changes in rates, curves, and more! A Grade Ahead introduces students to some of these topics in our upper-level math courses, using examples from physics to illustrate the concepts.
Calculus was needed to understand the relationships and interactions between the particles that many scientists then believed made up the universe. Physicists today still use calculus to study the motion and characteristics of these infinitesimally tiny particles, building on the ideas that Newton and other mathematicians developed during the Scientific Revolution.
Newton’s Scientific Explorations: Light, Color, Action
Sir Isaac Newton first tackled optics in the late 1660s-a concern of European scientists throughout the Scientific Revolution. In particular, Keppler, Descartes, and others were fascinated by the science of light and how we perceive light and color. They believed that understanding light was essential to understanding the universe. For generations, scientists assumed that light particles were all the same. Color was caused by an object refracting those particles differently on its surface.
Newton challenged this concept. He believed that light was made up of different particles in motion. These tiny particles of matter refract at different angles when they reach the retina of the eye because they are all unique. Our perception of color, then, has less to do with the object the light hits and more to do with the different ways in which particles of light move. Many scientists discounted Newton’s ideas at the time because he was a relatively unknown intellectual proposing a radical new idea. Now, however, physicists study the particles in motion.
Newton made many other discoveries as well, but he is perhaps best known for his exploration of planetary motion and, more famously, his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.
In The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), which is also called the Principia, Newton first agreed with previous scholars that objects will stay at rest (inertia) until acted upon by a force. Second, he suggested that the force that acts on these objects is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration. Third, for every action there is an equal reaction. Lastly, Newton proposed that all objects are attracted to each by a gravitational force as well. These theories, which both built on previous ideas and represented his own innovations, became the basis for physics as we understand it today, and Newton’s equations for measuring these concepts are still taught to students throughout the world.
Newton’s Legacy
The international reception of Principia meant that Isaac Newton became the leading British scientist. In 1699, he became a foreign member of the French Académie des Sciences. In 1703, he was elected the president of the British Royal Society. He died on March 31, 1727, in London after a lifetime of study and experimentation.
While in the late 1600s and early 1700s, Sir Isaac Newton’s ideas were considered revolutionary and radical, people today still study them. The story of the apple falling on Newton’s head continues to inspire young scientists and mathematicians.
What inspired you to be curious about math and science? Tell us your story below!
Check back next month, when A Grade Ahead’s deep dive into the history of math will feature Ada Lovelace. She was a nineteenth-century mathematician who envisioned how computers work to this day.
Summer is here! See if an A Grade Ahead near you is offering Mathventure Jr., Mathventure, or one of our other Enrichment Camps in your area! For more information, check out this blog post.
Author: Susanna Robbins, Teacher and Franchise Assistant at A Grade Ahead
