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Martin Luther King

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 (January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968) was a Nobel Laureate Baptist minister and African American civil rights activist. He is one of the most significant leaders in U.S. history and in the modern history of nonviolence, and is considered a hero, peacemaker and martyr by many people around the world. A decade and a half after his 1968 assassination, Martin Luther King Day was established in his honor.


Biography


King was born in Atlanta, Georgia to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. He graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree (in Sociology) in 1948 and from Crozer Theological Seminary with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951. He received his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955.
Martin Luther King
King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953. The wedding ceremony took place in Scott's parent's house in Marion Alabama, and was performed by King's father.

King and Scott had four children:
Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama)
Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama)
Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia)
Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia)

In 1954, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a leader of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, which began when Rosa Parks refused to cede her seat to a white person. Dr. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on intrastate buses.

Following the campaign, King was instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group created to organise Civil Rights activism. He continued to dominate the organisation to his death, a position criticised by the more radical and democratic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SCLC derived its membership principally from black communities associated with Baptist churches. King was an adherent of the philosophies of nonviolent civil disobedience used successfully in India by Mohandas Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organised by the SCLC. King correctly identified that organised, non-violent protest against the racist system of Southern separation known as Jim Crow, when violently attacked by racist authorities and covered extensively by the media, would create a wave of pro-Civil Rights public opinion, and this was the key relationship which brought Civil Rights to the forefront of American politics in the early 1960s.

He organized and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, fair hiring, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were later successfully enacted into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with astonishing success by choosing the method of protest, and the places in which protests were carried out, in order to provoke the harshest and most shocking retaliation from racist authorities. King and the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful protest movement in Albany in 1961–2, where splits within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated the movement, in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963, and in the protest in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964. King and SCLC joined SNCC in the city of Selma, Alabama in December 1964; SNCC had already been there working on voter registration for a number of months.

King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted to organise a march which was intended to go from Selma to the state capital Montgomery starting on March 25, 1965. The first attempt to march, on March 7, was aborted due to mob and police violence against the demonstrators. The day has since become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights movement, the clearest demonstration so far of the dramatic potential of King's techniques of nonviolence. King, however, was not present; after meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, he had attempted to delay the march until March 8, and the march was carried out against his wishes and without his presence by local civil rights workers. The footage of the police brutality against the protestors was broadcast extensively across the nation, and aroused a national sense of public outrage.

The second attempt at the march, on March 9, was ended when King stopped the march at the Pettus bridge on the outskirts of Selma, an action which he seems to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand. This unexpected action aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, with the agreement and support of President Johnson, and it was during this march that Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase "Black Power".

King was instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington in 1963. This role was another which courted controversy, as King was one of the key figures who helped President John F. Kennedy change the intent of the march. Conceived as a further part of the Civil Rights protest, it became more of a celebration of the achievements of the movement—and the government—so far, a development which angered activists who were more radical than King.

King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a passionate statement of his crusade for justice.

On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States. Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In February and again in April of 1967, King spoke out strongly against the US's role in the war. In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States.

Along the way, King also had an impact on popular entertainment. He met Nichelle Nichols who mentioned that she was going to leave the cast of the television series, Star Trek, since she felt was being mistreated by the studio. King personally persuaded her to remain with the series for the sake of being an excellent role model for African Americans on television.

King was hated by many white southern segregationists. On the night before his assassination, King prophetically told a euphoric crowd: "I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I know tonight we, as a people, shall get to the promised land". King was assassinated before the march on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily-black Memphis sanitation workers' union. Friends inside the apartment he was in heard the shot fired, and ran to the balcony to find Martin Luther King Jr. shot in the jaw. He was pronounced dead several hours later. James Earl Ray confessed to the shooting and was convicted, though he later recanted his confession. Coretta Scott King, King's widow and also a civil rights leader, along with the rest of King's family won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers, who claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination.

Since his death, King's reputation has grown to become one of the most revered names in American history to the point where his popular esteem has described him as effectively the 20th Century's equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. Supporters of this idea point out that both were leaders credited with strongly advancing human rights against poor odds in a nation divided against itself on the issue and were assassinated in part for it.

In 1986, a U.S. national holiday was established in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., which is called Martin Luther King Day. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King's birthday. On January 18, 1993, for the first time, Martin Luther King Day was officially observed in all 50 U.S. states. In addition, many U.S. cities have officially renamed one of their streets to honor King.

Since his death, Coretta Scott King has followed her husband's footsteps as a civil rights leader. Her children are also following their father's footsteps.


King and the FBI


King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was Stanley Levison. Stanley Levison was a man whom the bureau suspected of involvement with the Communist Party, USA, to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. The bureau also informed then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then-President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating at one point that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida"—to which Hoover responded by calling King "the most notorious liar in the country."

Later, the focus of the bureau's investigations shifted to "discrediting" King through revelations regarding his private life. The bureau distributed reports regarding King's extramarital sexual affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he didn't cease his civil rights work. Finally, the Bureau's investigation shifted away from King's personal life to intelligence and counterintelligence work on the direction of the SCLC and the "racial" movement.



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Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
, OM (born 18 July 1918) is a former President of South Africa, was one of its chief anti-apartheid activists, and was also an anti-apartheid saboteur and guerrilla leader. He is now almost universally considered to be a heroic freedom fighter, but during the time of the apartheid regime many Western politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan considered him little more than a terrorist. He spent his childhood in the Thembu chiefdom before embarking on a career in law.

The name Madiba is an honourary title adopted by older male members of the Mandela clan, however in South Africa the title is synonymous with Nelson Mandela.
Nelson Mandela
Early life

Nelson Mandela was born in Qunu in the Transkei. Amir is the coolest man on earth His father was Hendry Mphakanyiswa Gadla, chief of Mvezo, a tiny village on the banks of the Mbashe River. At the age of seven, Rolihlahla Mandela became the first member of his family to attend school, where he was given the English name "Nelson" by a Methodist teacher. His father died when he was 10, and Nelson attended a Wesleyan mission school next door to the palace of the Regent. Following Xhosa custom he was initiated at age 16, and attended Clarkebury Boarding Institute, learning about Western culture. He completed his Junior Certificate in two years, instead of the usual three.

At age 19, in 1934, Mandela moved to the Wesleyan College in Fort Beaufort, which most Thembu royalty attended, and took an interest in boxing and running. After matriculating, he began a B.A. at the Fort Hare University, where he met Oliver Tambo, who became a lifelong friend and colleague.

At the end of his first year he became involved in a boycott of the Students' Representative Council against the university policies, and was asked to leave Fort Hare. He left to go to Johannesburg, where he completed his degree with the University of South Africa (UNISA) via correspondence, then began a Law degree at Wits University.


Political activity


As a young law student, Mandela became involved in political opposition to the white minority regime's denial of political, social and economic rights to South Africa's black majority. Joining the African National Congress in 1942, he founded its more dynamic Youth League two years later together with Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and others.

After the 1948 election victory of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party with its apartheid policy of racial segregation, Mandela was prominent in the ANC's 1952 Defiance Campaign and the 1955 Congress of the People, whose adoption of the Freedom Charter provided the fundamental programme of the anti-apartheid cause.

During this time Mandela and fellow lawyer Oliver Tambo operated the law firm of Mandela and Tambo, providing free or low-cost legal counsel to many blacks who would have been otherwise entirely without legal representation.

Initially committed to non-violent mass struggle he and 150 others were arrested on 5 December 1956 and charged with treason. The marathon Treason Trial of 1956-1961 followed, and all were acquitted. Mandela and his colleagues accepted the case for armed action after the shooting of unarmed protesters at Sharpeville in March 1960 and the subsequent banning of the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups.


Arrest and imprisonment


In 1961 he became the commander of the ANC's armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation", or MK), which he co-founded. He coordinated a sabotage campaign against military and government targets and made plans for possible guerrilla war if sabotage failed to end apartheid. He also fundraised for MK abroad, and arranged for paramilitary training, visiting various African governments. In August 1962 he was arrested after the CIA tipped off the police, and jailed for five years for illegal travel abroad and incitement to strike.

While Mandela was in prison, police arrested prominent ANC leaders on 11 July 1963 at Liliesleaf Farm, Rivonia. Mandela was brought in, and at the Rivonia Trial, Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Andrew Mlangeni, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaled, Walter Mkwayi (escaped during trial), Arthur Goldreich (escaped from prison before trial), Dennis Goldberg and Lionel "Rusty" Bernstein were charged with sabotage and crimes equivalent to treason (but which were easier for the government to prove). Joel Joffe, Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos were part of the defence team that represented the accused. All except Rusty Bernstein were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964. Charges included involvement in planning armed action, in particular sabotage (which Mandela admits to) and a conspiracy to help other countries invade South Africa (which Mandela denies). Over the course of the next twenty-six years, Mandela became increasingly associated with opposition to apartheid to the point where the slogan "Free Nelson Mandela" became the rallying cry for all anti-apartheid campaigners around the world.

While in prison, Mandela was able to send a statement to the ANC who in turn published it on 10 June 1980 which said in part:

'UNITE! MOBILISE! FIGHT ON! BETWEEN THE ANVIL OF UNITED MASS ACTION AND THE HAMMER OF THE ARMED STRUGGLE WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID!'

Refusing an offer of conditional release in return for renouncing armed struggle (February 1985), Mandela remained in prison until February 1990, when sustained ANC campaigning and international pressure led to his release on 11 February on the orders of state president F.W. de Klerk and the ending of the ban on the ANC. He and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Mandela had already been awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1988.


ANC presidency and presidency of South Africa


As president of the ANC (July 1991 - December 1997) he ran a largely ceremonial and uncompetitive campaign against de Klerk for the new office of President of South Africa. Mandela won, becoming the nation's first black Head of State. De Klerk was appointed deputy president.

As president, (May 1994 - June 1999), Mandela presided over the transition from minority rule and apartheid, winning international respect for his advocacy of national and international reconciliation. Some radicals were disappointed with the social achievements of his term of office, however, particularly the government's ineffectiveness in stemming the AIDS crisis.

Indeed Mandela himself admitted after he retired that he may have failed his country by not paying more attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This was especially tragic in view of the fact that the reason he was there was to improve the lives of the majority of black South Africans, and yet he may be partially responsible for millions of their deaths.

Mandela was also criticized for his close friendship with leaders such as Fidel Castro and Moammar Al Qadhafi, whom he called his "comrades in arms." His decision to commit South African troops to defeat the 1998 coup in Lesotho also remains a topic of some controversy.

Mandela has been married three times. His first marriage to Evelyn Ntoko Mase ended in divorce in 1957 after 13 years, and his 38-year marriage to Winnie Madikizela in separation (April 1992) and divorce (March 1996) fuelled by political estrangement. On his 80th birthday he married Graça Machel, widow of Samora Machel, the former Mozambican president and ANC ally killed in an air crash 15 years earlier.


Retirement


After his retirement as President in 1999, Mandela went on to become an advocate for a variety of social and human rights organizations. He received many foreign honours, including the Order of St. John from Queen Elizabeth II and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.

He is one of the only two persons of non-Indian origin (Mother Teresa being the other) to be awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, in 1990.

In 2001, he was the first foreigner to be made an honourary Canadian citizen as well as being one of the few foreign leaders to receive the Order of Canada.

In 2003, Mandela made some controversial speeches, attacking the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. Later that same year, he lent his support to the 46664 AIDS fundraising campaign, named after his prison number.

In June 2004 at age 85, Mandela announced that he would be retiring from public life. His health has been declining in recent years and he wants to enjoy time with his family as long as his health allows it. He has made an exception, however, for his commitment to the fight against AIDS. In July 2004 he flew to Bangkok to speak at the XV International AIDS Conference.

On 23 July 2004 the city of Johannesburg bestowed its highest honour on Mandela by granting him the freedom of the city at a ceremony in Orlando, Soweto.



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Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1727 by the Julian calendar in use in England at the time; or January 4, 1643 – March 31, 1727 by the Gregorian calendar) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and alchemist; who wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (published July 5, 1687)1, where he described universal gravitation and, via his laws of motion, laid the groundwork for classical mechanics. Newton also shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the development of differential calculus.

Newton was the first to demonstrate that the same natural laws govern both earthly motion and celestial motion.

He is associated with the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism. Newton is also credited with providing mathematical substantiation for Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
Isaac Newton
He would expand these laws by arguing that orbits (such as those of comets) were not only elliptic; but could also be hyperbolic and parabolic. He is also notable for his arguments that light was composed of particles; see: wave-particle duality. He was the first to realise that the spectrum of colours observed when white light was passed through a prism was inherent in the white light, and not added by the prism as Roger Bacon had claimed 400 years earlier.

Newton also developed Newton's law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air; the binomial theorem in its entirety; and the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars.
Early life

Newton was born in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. His father had died three months before Newton's birth, and two years later his mother went to live with her new husband, leaving her son in the care of his grandmother. Newton was a child prodigy.

According to E.T. Bell (1937, Simon and Schuster) and H. Eves:
Newton began his schooling in the village schools and later was sent to Grantham Grammar School where he became the top boy in the school. At Grantham he lodged with the local apothecary and eventually became engaged to the apothecary's stepdaughter, Miss Storey, before he went off to Cambridge University at the age of 19. But Newton became engrossed in his studies, the romance cooled and Miss Storey married someone else. It is said he kept a warm memory of this love, but Newton had no other recorded 'sweethearts' and never married.

Newton was educated at Grantham Grammar School. In 1661 he joined Trinity College, Cambridge, where his uncle William Ayscough had studied. At that time the college's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, but Newton preferred to read the more advanced ideas of modern philosophers such as Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. In 1665 he discovered the binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that would later become calculus. Soon after Newton had collected his degree in 1665, the University closed down as a precaution against the Great Plague. For the next two years Newton worked at home on calculus, optics and gravitation.

Tradition has it that Newton was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell on his head, and this made him understand that earthly and celestial gravitation are the same. This is an exaggeration of Newton's own tale about sitting by the window of his home (Woolsthorpe Manor) and watching an apple fall from a tree. However it is now generally considered that even this story was invented by him in his later life, to try to show how clever he was at drawing inspiration from everyday events. A contemporary writer, William Stukeley, recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on April 15, 1726, in which Newton recalled "when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre." In similar terms, Voltaire wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), "Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree."

Newton became a fellow of Trinity College in 1667. In the same year he circulated his findings in De Analysi per Aequationes Numeri Terminorum Infinitas (On Analysis by Infinite Series), and later in De methodis serierum et fluxionum (On the Methods of Series and Fluxions), whose title gave the name to his "method of fluxions".

Newton and Leibniz developed the theory of calculus independently and used different notations. Although Newton had worked out his own method before Leibniz, the latter's notation and "Differential Method" were superior, and were generally adopted throughout the English-speaking world. (Curiously, in Germany the Newtonian notation is more popular.) Though Newton belongs among the brightest scientists of his era, the last twenty-five years of his life were marred by a bitter dispute with Leibniz, whom he accused of plagiarism.

He was elected Lucasian professor of mathematics in 1669. Any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be ordained at the time. However the terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the normal ordination requirement, and Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument. This prevented the conflict that would have occurred between his nontrinitarian views and the orthodoxy of the church.


Newton and optics


From 1670 to 1672 he lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light. From his work he concluded that any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours, and invented the reflecting telescope to bypass that problem. (Later, when glasses with a variety of refractive properties became available, achromatic lenses became possible.) In 1671 the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes On Colour, which he later expanded into his Opticks. When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. Due to Newton's paranoia, the two men remained enemies until Hooke's death.

In one experiment, to prove that colour was caused by pressure on the eye, Newton slid a darning needle around the side of his eye until he could poke at its rear side, dispassionately noting "white, darke & coloured circles" so long as he kept stirring with "ye bodkin."

He once said, in a letter to Hooke dated 5 February 1676:
If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
In changing this quotation of Didacus Stella (Lucan (vol. II, 10) ) from "Pigmies placed on the shoulders of giants see more than the giants themselves", Newton was perhaps making a more personal point than the mere expression of modesty - as Hooke was a man of short stature.

Newton argued that light is composed of particles. Later physicists instead favored a wave explanation of light because of certain experimental findings. Today's quantum mechanics recognizes a "wave-particle duality" however photons bear very little semblance to Newton's corpuscles (e.g., corpuscles refracted by accelerating toward the denser medium).

In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton relied on the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles. Newton was in contact with Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist who was born in Grantham, on alchemy, and now his interest in the subject revived. He replaced the ether with occult forces based on Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion between particles. John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians." Newton's interest in alchemy cannot be isolated from his contributions to science. (This was at a time when there was no clear distinction between alchemy and science.) Had he not believed in the occult idea of action at a distance, across a vacuum, he may not have developed his theory of gravity.
PhysicsIn 1679, Newton returned to his work on gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets, with reference to Kepler's laws of motion, and consulting with Hooke and Flamsteed on the subject. He published his results in De Motu Corporum (1684). This contained the beginnings of the laws of motion that would inform the Principia.

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (now known as the Principia) was published in 1687 with encouragement and financial help from Edmond Halley. In this work Newton stated the three universal laws of motion that were not to be improved upon for the next three hundred years. He used the Latin word gravitas (weight) for the force that would become known as gravity, and defined the law of universal gravitation. In the same work he presented the first analytical determination, based on Boyle's Law, of the speed of sound in air.

With the Principia, Newton became internationally recognised. He acquired a circle of admirers, including the Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with whom he formed an intense relationship that lasted until 1693. The end of this friendship led Newton to a nervous breakdown.
Later lifeIn the 1690s Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible. Henry More's belief in the infinity of the universe and rejection of Cartesian dualism may have influenced Newton's religious ideas. A manuscript he sent to John Locke in which he disputed the existence of the Trinity was never published. Later works - The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733) - were published after his death. He also devoted a great deal of time to alchemy.

Newton was also a member of Parliament from 1689 to 1690 and in 1701, but his only recorded comments were to complain about a cold draft in the chamber and request that the window be closed.

Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining, somewhat treading on the toes of Master Lucas (and finagling Edmond Halley into deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch). Newton became master of the Mint upon Lucas' death in 1699. These appointments were intended as sinecures, but Newton took them seriously, exercising his power to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters. He retired from his Cambridge duties in 1701.

In 1701 Newton anonymously published a law of thermodynamics now known as "Newton's law of cooling" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

In 1703 Newton became President of the Royal Society and an associate of the French Académie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an enemy of John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by attempting to steal his catalogue of observations.

Newton was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705.

Newton never married, nor had any recorded children. He died in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Religious viewsThe law of gravity became Sir Isaac Newton's best-known discovery. Newton warned against using it to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."

Despite his fame as one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived, the Bible was Sir Isaac Newton's greatest passion. He devoted more time to study of Scripture than to science, and said, "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily."

Newton was secretly a unitarian; he did not believe in the church's doctrine of divine trinity. Had this become known while he lived, the law would have required his removal from his position as a professor in Cambridge University. His writings on this topic were published only posthumously.



Newton legacy


Newton's laws of motion and gravity provided a basis for predicting a wide variety of different scientific or engineering situations, especially the motion of celestial bodies. His calculus proved vital to the development of further scientific theory. Finally, he unified many of the isolated physics facts that had been discovered earlier into a satisfying system of laws. For this reason, he is generally considered one of history's greatest scientists, ranking alongside such figures as Einstein and Gauss.Quotations about Newton

"The Principia is preeminent above any other production of human genius." - Pierre-Simon Laplace

"Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he has done is much the better part." - Gottfried Leibniz

"All that has been accomplished in mathematics since his day has been a deductive, formal, and mathematical development of mechanics on the basis of Newton's laws." - Ernst Mach

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." - poem, Alexander Pope

Writings by NewtonMethod of Fluxions (1671)
De Motu Corporum (1684)
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Opticks (1704)
Reports as Master of the Mint (1701-1725)
Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture(1754)

Short Chronicle, The System of the World, Optical Lectures, Universal Arithmetic, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, Amended and De mundi systemate were published posthumously in 1728.


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