Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton worked out the calculus, the composition of white light and the law of universal gravitation in two years at his mother’s farm while Cambridge was closed by plague, and published almost none of it for twenty years. The Principia of 1687, written in Latin and geometry, derived Kepler’s laws and the tides from a single force and is the most important book in the history of science; the Opticks, in English and experiments, is the more readable. He was master of the Mint, president of the Royal Society, and a secret heretic and alchemist. St. John’s reads the Principia with the proofs.