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How Did Isaac Newton Contribute To The Scientific Revolution

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How Did Isaac Newton Contribute To The Scientific Revolution
Introduction
Throughout history, many brilliant individuals have impacted the world with their ideas and discoveries, and many of those influences live on today. During the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, a breakthrough in scientific discovery brought forth numerous findings that greatly contrasted many of the theories and thought processes that dominated at the time. One man in particular, Sir Isaac Newton, took the world by storm from 1643 to 1747. As a student, Newton was not a stellar academic and was overlooked for many of his advancements as a young man. Little did his family and professors know that Newton would revolutionize the world of science.
Sir Isaac Newton is often credited as being one of the primary leaders of the Scientific Revolution with his exceptional work in optics, calculus, alchemy, mathematics, motion, and gravity. Newton published many of his experimental findings in one of his greatest works, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
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While much of his time was dedicated to mathematics and optics during these years, he also examined circular motion, analyzed the moon and the planets, and laid the foundations for his laws of gravity. Newton studied Descartes La Géometrie among other mathematical works and discovered the binomial theorem. He also discovered the method of fluxions, which was his realization that “the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure of differentiating it.” (CONNOR/ ROBERTSON, 2000:3) Using his new discovery of fluxions, Newton wrote On Analysis by Infinite Series (1669) and On the Methods of Series and Fluxions (1671) and invented new methods to find areas, tangents, minimum and maximum points on graphs, and the length of curves. Newton also expressed his belief in an infinite series and developed both differential and integral

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