Isaac Newton

Cambridge closed in 1665 because of the plague, and the young graduate went home to the family farm. Over about eighteen months he worked out the method of fluxions (calculus), split white light with prisms, and began to ask whether the force that drops an apple also holds the Moon.

He published almost none of it for years. Calculus waited until a bitter priority fight with Leibniz, who had found it independently and whose dx and ∫ notation won.

Passing sunlight through a prism gave a spread of colours. His crucial experiment sent one colour through a second prism: it bent again but stayed the same colour. White light is not pure; it is all the colours together.

Lenses smear colours, so in 1668 he built a reflecting telescope that used a curved mirror instead. Most big research telescopes today are reflectors.

In 1687 Edmond Halley paid to print the Principia. It states three laws of motion and one law of gravity: every mass pulls every other mass with a force that falls with the square of the distance.

With those few rules he derived Kepler's orbits, the tides, and the flattening of the Earth at the poles. Heaven and Earth obeyed the same mathematics for the first time.

In 1696 he left Cambridge to run the Royal Mint in London, first as Warden and then as Master. He reorganised the recoinage and pursued counterfeiters in person. He became President of the Royal Society in 1703 and was knighted in 1705.