---
title: "Isaac Newton"
chunk: 15/17
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:07:12.165802+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Physicist Edward Andrade stated that Newton "was capable of greater sustained mental effort than any man, before or since". He also noted the place of Newton in history, stating:From time to time in the history of mankind a man arises who is of universal significance, whose work changes the current of human thought or of human experience, so that all that comes after him bears evidence of his spirit. Such a man was Shakespeare, such a man was Beethoven, such a man was Newton, and, of the three, his kingdom is the most widespread. The French physicist and mathematician Jean-Baptiste Biot praised Newton's genius, stating that:
Never was the supremacy of intellect so justly established and so fully confessed . . . In mathematical and in experimental science without an equal and without an example; combining the genius for both in its highest degree.Despite his rivalry with Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz, Leibniz still praised the work of Newton, with him responding to a question at a dinner in 1701 from Sophia Charlotte, the Queen of Prussia, about his view of Newton with:Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time of when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
The mathematician E.T. Bell ranked Newton alongside Carl Friedrich Gauss and Archimedes as the three greatest mathematicians of all time, with the mathematician Donald M. Davis also noting that Newton is generally ranked with the other two as the greatest mathematicians ever. In his 1962 paper from the journal The Mathematics Teacher, the mathematician Walter Crosby Eells sought to objectively create a list that classified the most eminent mathematicians of all time; Newton was ranked first out of a list of the top 100, a position that was statistically confirmed even after taking probable error into account in the study. In his book Wonders of Numbers in 2001, the science editor and author Clifford A. Pickover ranked his top ten most influential mathematicians that ever lived, placing Newton first in the list. In The Cambridge Companion to Isaac Newton (2016), he is described as being "from a very young age, an extraordinary problem-solver, as good, it would appear, as humanity has ever produced". He is ultimately ranked among the top two or three greatest theoretical scientists ever, alongside James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein, the greatest mathematician ever alongside Carl F. Gauss, and in the first rank of experimentalists, thereby putting "Newton in a class by himself among empirical scientists, for one has trouble in thinking of any other candidate who was in the first rank of even two of these categories." Also noted is "At least in comparison to subsequent scientists, Newton was also exceptional in his ability to put his scientific effort in much wider perspective". Gauss himself had Archimedes and Newton as his heroes, and used terms such as clarissimus or magnus to describe other intellectuals such as great mathematicians and philosophers, but reserved summus for Newton only, and once realising the immense influence of Newton's work on scientists such as Lagrange and Pierre-Simon Laplace, Gauss then exclaimed that "Newton remains forever the master of all masters!"
In his book Great Physicists, the chemist William H. Cropper highlighted the unparalleled genius of Newton, stating: