Newton’s own work, as he readily admitted, owed much to the achievements of earlier thinkers, the names of Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Johannes Kepler being pre-eminent among these. Yet there were important underlying concepts from more ancient thinkers still, such as the geometrical ideas of Plato, Eudoxos, Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonios.
