Activity

——————–JURNAL———————–
I
saac Newton
(1642–1727) was born in the tiny hamlet of
Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire in England. At Trinity Col-
lege, Cambridge University, he studied contemporary
works, such as a Latin edition of Descartes’s
La Ge
́
ome
́
trie
and John Wallis’s book on infinite series. Inspired by the
latter he produced, while still a student, the infinite series
expansion for the
binomial expression
(
p
+
q
)
m/n
; the finite
version shown on the stamp had been known centuries
earlier.
In the 17th century much progress had been made on the
two branches of the infinitesimal calculus, now called ‘dif-
ferentiation’ and ‘integration’. It was gradually becoming
realised that these processes are inverse to each other.
Around 1666 Newton investigated the rules of calculus and
explained for the first time why this inverse relationship
holds.
The story of Isaac Newton and the apple is well known.
Seeing an apple fall to the ground, he realised that the
gravitational force pulling it to earth was the same as that
which kept the moon orbiting the earth and the earth
orbiting the sun. This planetary motion is governed by a
universal law of gravitation
, the
inverse-square law
: the
force of attraction between two objects varies as the product
of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance
between them.
In his
Principia Mathematica
(1687), possibly the greatest
scientific work of all time, Newton used this law to explain
Kepler’s laws of
elliptical planetary motion
and account for
cometary orbits, the variation of tides, and the flattening of
the earth at the poles due to the earth’s rotation