Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. Newton came from a family of modest yeoman farmers. His father died several months before he was born. His mother remarried and moved to a nearby village three years later. She left Isaac in the care of his maternal grandmother. Upon the death of his stepfather in 1656, Newton's mother removed him from grammar school in Grantham in hopes …

…In 1734, a Swiss mathematician Leonhard Eular introduced an important step in calculus, partial derivatives of functions of several variables. Eular and other mathematicians, such as Jacques, Johann, and Daniel Bernoulli of Switzerland, and Pierre Laplace of France, applied calculus to problems in mechanics and probability. In early 19th century, the French mathematician A. L. Cauchy put calculus on a logically rigorous basis, and it became part of a general theory of real and complex variables.