Sir Isaac Newton FRS ( ) (4 January 1643 31 March 1727) [ OS: 25 December 1642 20 March 1727 ] was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian. His treatise Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica published in 1687, and said to be the greatest single work in the history of science, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. He showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.

In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he invented the reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.

In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed the so-called "Newton's method" for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.

In a 2005 poll of the Royal Society of who had the greatest effect on the history of science, Newton was deemed much more influential than Albert Einstein.