Sir Isaac newton was born on 1/4/1943 in the United kingdom. He was the son of a local prosperous farmer, also named Isaac Newton, who died three months before he was born. At age three, Isaac’s mother then remarried a minister, leaving him in the care of his grandmother. Newton was reunited with his mother at age twelve, after her second husband died. He was enrolled in King’s School of Grantham, where he lived with an apothecary. This was the first time Newton was introduced to chemistry. His mother removed him from the school to become a farmer, but he disliked …show more content…
He studied calculus for a large portion of his life. Newton realized the slope of a curve was constantly changing, and there was no effective equation to calculate the tangent line to the curve at any given point. A slope at a particular point had to be approximated by taking the average slope of smaller segments of the curve. Newton, with the help of Gottfried Leibniz, calculated a derivative function f ‘(x). This gives the slope at any point of a function f(x). It was a much quicker method than the one previously being used. This process of calculating the slope or derivative of a curve or function is called differential calculus. Newton tended to call it the “method of fluxions” and the instantaneous rate of change at a point on a curve the "fluxion", and the changing values of x and y are the “fluents". Having established the derivative function for a particular curve, it is then an easy matter to calculate the slope at any particular point on that curve, just by inserting a value for x. In the case of a time-distance graph, for example, this slope represents the speed of the object at a particular