Leonardo da Vinci (14 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was a Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. The Mona Lisa is the famous of his works and the most famous portrait ever made. The last supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon. He is also known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on science and invention; these involve a variety of subjects including anatomy, cartography, painting, and palaeontology. Leonardo's collective works compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary Michelangelo.
Properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, Leonardo was born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, in Vinci, in region of Florence, Italy. Leonardo was educated in the Studio of the renowned Italian painter Andrea del Verrocchop. Much of his earlier working life was spend in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan, and he later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice. He spent his last three years in France, Where he died in 1519.
Although he had no formal academic training, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Renaissance Man" or "Universal Genius", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination." He is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote." Scholars interprt his view of the world as being based in logic, though the empirical methods he used were unorthodox for his time.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualized flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing tensile strength of wire. He is also sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology, optics and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on subsequent science.
Issac Newton
Issac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 - 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in scientific revolution. His book Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, laid the foundations of classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contribution to optics, and shares credit with Gottfried Wihelm Leibniz for developing the infinitesimal calculus.
In principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to prove Kepler's laws of planetary. Newton to prove Kepler's Laws of planetary motion, accounts for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating doubt about the solar system's heliocentricity. He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles. Newton's inference that the Earth is an oblate spheroid was later confirmed by the geodetic measurements of Maupertuis, La condamine, and others, convincing most European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over earlier system.
Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum. His work on light was collected in his highly influential book Opticks, published in 1704. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling, made the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed a methods for approximately the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves.
Newton was a fellow of Trinity college and the second Lucasian Professor of mathematics at the university of cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox christian who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Unusually for a member of the cambridge faculty of the day, he refused to take holy orders in the church of English. Beyond his work on the mathematical science, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. Politically and personally tied to the Whig party, Newton served two brief terms as a Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, in 1689-90 and 1701-02. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 and spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696-1699) and Master (1699-1727) of the Royal Mint, as well as president of the Royal Society (1703-1727).
