Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/Old Style and New Style dates">OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history. Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism.

Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles. He also developed a law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air. He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars. Despite this renown in mainstream science, Newton actually spent more time working on alchemy than physics, writing considerably more papers on the former than the latter.

Newton played a major role in the development of calculus, sharing credit with Madhava and Gottfried Leibniz. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example the generalised binomial theorem. The mathematician and mathematical physicist Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), said that "Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."

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Journal of Mathematical Physics: All Topics

Dispersionful analog of the Whitham hierarchy
Blazej M. Szablikowski and Maciej Blaszak The transition from the zero-genus universal Whitham hierarchy to its dispersionful counterpart, making use only of the Lax representations, is presented. This is an alternative approach to that of Takasaki who has recently shown that the dispersionless limit of the charged multicomponent Kadomtsev- ... [J. Math. Phys. 49, 082701 (2008)] published Thu Aug 28, 2008.
Symplectic and multisymplectic Lobatto methods for the ``good'' Boussinesq equation
A. Aydin and B. Karasozen In this paper, we construct second order symplectic and multisymplectic integrators for the good Boussineq equation using the two-stage Lobatto IIIA-IIIB partitioned RungeKutta method, which yield an explicit scheme and is equivalent to the classical central difference approximation to the second or ... [J. Math. Phys. 49, 083509 (2008)] published Wed Aug 27, 2008.
Asymptotic counting of BPS operators in superconformal field theories
James Lucietti and Mukund Rangamani We consider some aspects of counting BPS operators which are annihilated by two supercharges in superconformal field theories. For nonzero coupling, the corresponding multivariable partition functions can be written in terms of generating functions for vector partitions or their weighted generalizat ... [J. Math. Phys. 49, 082301 (2008)] published Wed Aug 27, 2008.

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