Sir Isaac Newton makes the Investor's Business Daily

The newspaper, Investor's Business Daily, runs columns about sucessful people it deams worthy of emulation. To my surprise, I found on purchasing the issue of October 21, 1998, that Isaac Newton was profiled.

"Newton At A Glance" describes him as a physicist "credited with developing calculus and the Laws of Motion, discovering the nature of light, and revolutionizing the Scientific Method."

Here is what Laura Litvan wrote about Newton:

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

He Never Let Go Of A Problem Till He Solved It

by Laura M. Litvan, Investor's Business Daily


Sir Isaac Newton, having explained how gravity works, uncovered that light is a spectrum of color and revolutionized the scientific method, was exhausted.

He was in his mid-50's and had suffered two nervous breakdowns. There was even concern that he was suffering from mercury poisoning, following his years of experimentation.

But that didn't mean he was giving up.

Despite his condition, he could still follow the trail of deductive reasoning . So he did. And he did so with gusto.

Newton (1642-1727) agreed to head His Majesty's Royal Mint. Counterfeiting at that time was so rampant that the mint was replacing every coin in circulation.

He took to London's mean streets himself, often donning disguises. He cultivated his own informants, infiltrated counterfeiters' hideouts and eavesdropped on their meetings.

His relentless pursuit paid off, leading to the capture of one of London's more notorious couterfeiters, the elusive William Chaloner.

Newton, who lived to the age of 85, took the same approach whether he was helping in the British mint or explaining the nature of light. He immersed himself in a problem until it was solved.

A Child's Curiosity


The English scientist, whose illiterate farmer father died before he was born and whose mother had little time for him, always retained a child's curiosity about what was at hand. And that curiosity, it appears, gave him the patience to pursue the great questions of nature.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world," he once said. "But to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Out of that childlike curiosity came amazing results: He not only explained how gravity works and the nature of light, but how the tides rise and fall. He developed calculus and the laws of motion.

While Newton was, by all accounts, a genius, his success stemmed as much from hard work. When he was a young man, he created his own self-study course that led from natural curiosity to intellectual odyssey. Spotting potential, his headmaster waived his tuition.

As a student at Cambridge's Trinity College in the 1600s, Newton began to keep a notebook about philosophical questions. He indexed various subjects he wanted to probe -- air, matter, time and eternity, and sleep.

He taught himself math because he decided philosophy couldn't answer all his questions about the universe.

As a sign of his resolve to understand the world around him, he scrawled on the first page, "I am a friend of Plato, I am a friend of Aristotle, but truth is my greater friend."

His notes led him to conduct experiements. He committed himself to the Gallileo's scientific method: gathering data, formulating scientific hypotheses and then conducting experiments to validate or disprove his hypotheses.

Later, he took Galileo's method further, insisting that analysis reduce all questions to their core. For example, he didn't stop studying a compound until he'd identified all of its elements and their properties.

That insistence helped him discover that gravity wasn't just a force between two objects. It was directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, he concluded.

Courting Exhaustion


In his dogged pursuits, Newton courted physical and mental exhaustion, often working into the morning hours.

"If he had not wrought with his hands making experiements, he had killed himself with study," John North, Trinity's master, once recalled.

He even tracked how he almost made himself blind.

Ignoring every mother's advice, Newton not only gazed into the sun but stared at its reflection in a mirror until he lost his power to focus. He shut himself up in darkened rooms for days. When his vision finally came back, he carefully charted what had happened in his notebook.

To study light, he spent months in a dark room, intercepting a beam with a prism. Through a series of painstaking experiments over those months, he proved that white light is made up of seven colors.

He spent an entire year toiling over calculations in which variables change. He called his system "fluxions." Today it's called calculus. He was just 24.

Exacting, Effective


Newton also had his failings. For one, he left little room for others' views. As master of the Royal Mint and later president of the Royal Society, England's scientific institution, he was known to browbeat others into accepting his plans for how things should be.

But while he was domineering, he also was effective. When he took over the Royal Society, it was little more than a social club. Rather than discuss serious scientific questions, members were busy figuring out things like what poisons might have been used in the latest sensational murder.

Newton rebuilt the Royal Society from the ground up. He demanded that the group return to its original mission of seeking out the laws of nature. And he made every member pay for the privilege, carefully collecting dues. It quickly turned around.

"Everything was transacted with great attention and solemnity and decency," one society member, Dr. William Stukely, said. "Indeed, his presence created a natural awe in the assembly."

Just as he could be a relentless problem solver, he could be a relentless -- and sometimes unscrupulous -- competitor.

The most notable case involved the discovery of calculus. Newton didn't publish his findings abroad for about 20 years. That left the door open to rivals. Indeed, German scientist Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz lay claim to the discovery with a scientific paper.

The two became locked in a bitter feud about whether Leibniz had borrowed Newton's ideas years earlier when the two had met in London.

Newton hatched a nasty scheme to ensure he would win out. He got his rival to agree to let an independent panel within the Royal Society decide the matter. But as president, Newton appointed his friends to the panel and even secretly wrote the committee's report.

It would take historians 200 years to figure out that both men had independently arrived at the same discovery.