An English scientist and politician who made a major contribution to the understanding of many aspects of science and engineering. Although not overly successful at school, he was taken away from school to work on his mother’s farm. His uncle, however, noticed his talent in mathematics and had him sent back to school, and eventually on to Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became Fellow in 1667. He became professor of physics two years later, was a Member of Parliament from 1689, and was Master of the Mint in 1699. He was president of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death. His most productive years were 1665–66, during which he produced a wealth of ideas. He discovered the binomial theorem and the beginnings of differential and integral calculus. He started research on light to show that sunlight was made up of the seven colours of the rainbow, and began ideas of gravity to account for the path of the moon. He proposed a law that any two bodies attract each other in proportion to the product of their masses and inversely to the square of their distances apart. To do this, he had to define the meaning of mass, momentum, force, inertia, and to state his three laws of motion. He also established other laws such as Newton’s law of cooling.