Who is Sir Isaac Newton from Ideas and Opinions and what is their importance?

Sir Isaac Newton was a great English physicist, mathematician, and astronomer. In 1687, Newton described gravitation and the three laws of motion, upon which classical mechanics are built. Einstein respects Newton as a genius, who was placed by destiny at a turning point in the history of the human intellect. Newton influenced Western thought, research, and practice. He was a brilliant inventor of key methods, and he uniquely commanded the empirical material available in his day. Before he perfected the method of integral calculus, no one—even Kepler—found a way of representing the deeper features of the empirical world. Einstein's special theory of relativity diverges in principle considerably from Newton's, fusing the conservation of mass and the conservation of energy, but yields results so close to Newton's as to be indistinguishable by experience. Newton's great and lucid ideas remain for Einstein the foundation of modern science.