Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, near Grantham, on December 25, 1642, and died at Kensington, London, on March 20, 1727.

Isaac Newton came from a family of farmers but never knew his father, also named Isaac Newton. His father, who had died shortly before Newton was born, was a yeoman farmer, and it was intended that Newton should carry on the paternal farm. He was sent to school at Grantham, where his learning and mechanical proficiency excited some attention. In 1656 he returned home to learn the business of a farmer, but spent most of his time solving problems, making experiments, or devising mechanical models; his mother noticing this, sensibly resolved to find some more congenial occupation for him, and his uncle, having been himself educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, recommended that he should be sent there.

Newton entered Trinity College Cambridge, on 5 June 1661. He was older than most of his fellow students but, despite the fact that his mother was financially well off, he entered as a sizar. A sizar at Cambridge was a student who received an allowance toward college expenses in exchange for acting as a servant to other students.

Newton's aim at Cambridge was a law degree. Instruction at Cambridge was dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle but some freedom of study was allowed in the third year of the course. Newton studied the philosophy of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, and in particular Boyle. The mechanics of the Copernican astronomy of Galileo attracted him and he also studied Kepler's Optics.

On account of the plague the College was sent down during parts of the year 1665 and 1666, and for several months at this time Newton lived at home. This period was crowded with brilliant discoveries. He thought out the fundamental principles of his theory of gravitation, namely, that every particle of matter attracts every other particle, and he suspected that the attraction varied as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. He also worked out the fluxional calculus tolerably completely: this in a manuscript dated November 13, 1665, he used fluxions to find the tangent and the radius of curvature at any point on a curve, and in October 1666 he applied them to several problems in the theory of equations. Newton communicated these results to his friends and pupils from and after 1669, but they were not published in print till many years later. It was also whilst staying at home at this time that he devised some instruments for grinding lenses to particular forms other than spherical, and perhaps he decomposed solar light into different colours.

On his return to Cambridge in 1667 Newton was elected to a fellowship at his college, and permanently took up his residence there. In the early part of 1669, or perhaps in 1668, he revised Barrow's lectures for him. The end of the fourteenth lecture is known to have been written by Newton, but how much of the rest is due to his suggestions cannot now be determined. As soon as this was finished he was asked by Barrow and Collins to edit and add notes to a translation of Kinckhuysen's Algebra; he consented to do this, but on condition that his name should not appear in the matter. In 1670 he also began a systematic exposition of his analysis by infinite series, the object of which was to express the ordinate of a curve in an infinite algebraical series every term of which can be integrated by Wallis's rule; his results on this subject had been communicated to Barrow, Collins, and others in 1669. This was never finished: the fragment was published in 1711, but the substance of it had been printed as an appendix to the Optics in 1704. These works were only the fruit of Newton's leisure, most of his time during these two years being given up to optical researches.

As a firm opponent of the attempt by King James II to make the universities into Catholic institutions, Newton was elected Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge to the Convention Parliament of 1689, and sat again in 1701-1702. Meanwhile, in 1696 he had moved to London as Warden of the Royal Mint. He became Master of the Mint in 1699, an office he retained to his death. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1671.

In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society and was re-elected each year until his death. He was knighted in 1705 by Queen Anne, the first scientist to be so honoured for his work. However the last portion of his life was not an easy one, dominated in many ways with the controversy with Leibniz over which had invented the calculus.

As Newtonian science became increasingly accepted on the Continent, and especially after a general peace was restored in 1714, following the War of the Spanish Succession, Newton became the most highly esteemed natural philosopher in Europe. His last decades were passed in revising his major works, polishing his studies of ancient history, and defending himself against critics, as well as carrying out his official duties. Newton was modest, diffident, and a man of simple tastes. He was angered by criticism or opposition, and harboured resentment; he was harsh towards enemies but generous to friends. In government, and at the Royal Society, he proved an able administrator. He never married and lived modestly, but was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.


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