Isaac Newton

On 5 July 1687, Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica came off the press in London. The Royal Society had already spent its year's budget on a book about fish, so Edmond Halley paid the printing costs himself and talked Newton out of pulling the whole thing over a priority dispute with Robert Hooke.

On 4 January 1643, Isaac Newton was born in a hamlet in Lincolnshire - a premature, posthumous child who would go on to invent calculus, write the greatest physics book ever published, and spend thirty years looking for the philosopher's stone.