Contemporaries

Who were Newton's contemporaries?

Isaac Newton lived from 1643 to 1727. Among his contemporaries were not only fellow scientists, but painters, composers and writers.

Newton
1643–1727
Bach
1685–1750
Vermeer
1632–1675
Leibniz
1646–1716
Voltaire
1694–1778
1650 1690 1730 1770
Science Music Art Literature

The highlighted column is Newton's life. Each bar is someone whose own life overlapped it.

Parallels

Meanwhile, in the same years.

The calculus war

Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently, then spent their later years in a bitter dispute over who did it first.

Light in Delft

While Newton split light into its colours, Vermeer was quietly painting light itself in the Dutch town of Delft.

A new music begins

Bach was born in 1685, into a world that Newton's Principia (1687) was about to reorder.

Reason takes hold

Voltaire, who would later carry Newton's ideas across France, was a young man of 32 when Newton died in 1727.

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