Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) stands as the most significant figure of modern science. His magnum opus, Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica published by the Royal Society in 1687, is variously classified as the greatest work in the history of science and it was named by Albert Einstein as ‘perhaps the greatest intellectual stride that it has ever been granted to any man to make’.

Born in 1642 (the year in which Galileo Galilei died), Newton arrived at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 1661 during the ongoing Scientific Revolution as lead, in astronomy, by Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Nicholas Mercator, Christiaan Huygens and more. When the plague shut down the University in 1665, Newton entered a period of intense private study that, over the following two years, resulted in the foundations for his monumental theories on calculus, light and gravitation—later published in the Principia (1687), Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (1704) and De methodis serierum et fluxionum (1736).

The Principia (1687) elucidates the universal physical laws of gravitation and motion which lie behind phenomena described by Newton’s predecessors Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Newton establishes the mathematical basis for the motion of bodies in unresisting space (the law of inertia); the motion of fluids and the effect of friction on bodies moving through fluids; and, most importantly, sets forth the law of universal gravitation and its unifying role in the cosmos. ‘For the first time a single mathematical law could explain the motion of objects on earth as well as the phenomena of the heavens [...] It was this grand conception that produced a general revolution in human thought, equaled perhaps only by that following Darwin’s Origin of Species’ (Printing and the Mind of Man). Newton’s scientific views were not seriously challenged until Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, but his principles and methods remain essential for the solution of many scientific questions.

Christie’s holds the records for selling the six most expensive copies of Newton’s Principia to come to auction, including: the first edition copy finely bound for presentation by the work’s publisher/bookseller Samuel Smith that sold in 2016 for $3,719,500; King James II’s copy, to whom the work is dedicated, that sold in 2013 for $2,517,000; and the first-edition copy bound in contemporary vellum from the Biblioteca Magliabechiana in Florence and later owned by Victor Puiseuxand that sold in 2025 for €825,000.

In 2021, Christie’s sold one of the rarest pieces in the history of science ever to come to marker: Newton’s own scientific manuscript, revising the Principia for the projected second edition, which achieved £1,702,500 at auction.