December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1726
It would be easy to just say that Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity, the tides, comets and colored light. It would be wrong…but it would be easy.
Newton is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientific minds in human history and one of the principle minds behind what would become the Enlightenment. A genius, he used mathematics to explain everything from philosophy to the movement of the planets. He created the first reflecting telescope to study the movement of comets and other celestial objects. He determined, via prism, that the light spectrum contained an array of colors that were intrinsic to the white light itself. Love it or hate it, he invented Calculus.
And, as legend has it, he used observations of an apple tree in his garden to formulate his theory of gravitation.