Biography of Isaac Newton – I

Isaac Newton was born on the first hours of the 25 th of December of 1642 (4th of January of 1643,
according to the Gregorian calendar), in the little town of Woolsthorpe, in the Lincolnshire county.
His father, a small landowner, had just passed away at the start of October, after having married in
April of the same year to Hannah Ayscough, who came from a family that was once wealthy. When
the little Isaac had just turned three years old, his mother again got married with the reverend
Barnabas Smith, rector of North Witham, which resulted in a decisive influence in the development
of the character of Newton: Hannah moved to the house of her new husband and her son stayed in
Woolsthorpe in the care of his maternal grandmother.

The fact that in a list of sins in which he self-incriminated when he was nineteen years old, the
thirteenth sin was having wished to burn their house with them inside, gives a good account of the
hatred that it made Newton conceive against his mother and the reverend Smith. When Newton was
12 years old, his mother, again a widow, returned to Woolsthorpe, bringing with her a substantial
inheritance bequeathed to her by her second husband (of which Newton would benefit until her
death in 1679), as well as three stepbrothers for Isaac, two girls and a boy.

Newton’s Apple

A year later Newton was enrolled in the King’s School in the nearby town of Grantham. There are
testimonies that say that in the years he spent living in the house of the pharmacist, his unusual
mechanical skill was developed, which he used in the construction of many diverse mechanisms
(the most cited one is a water clock) and toys (the famous kites, to whose tail he tied lanterns that at
night scared his neighbors). An important change to his character also occurred: his initial
indifference for studying, most likely born out of shyness and reservedness, was transformed into a
fierce competitive spirit that led him to being the first of his class, due to a fight with a schoolmate
of which he came out victorious.

He was a sober, quiet and meditative boy, who preferred building utensils so girls could play with
their dolls, rather than sharing in the amusements of the other boys, according to the testimony of
one of his childhood female schoolmates, who, when she was already an old woman, was attributed
a teenager relationship with Newton, the only known relationship of his with a woman.

After his sixteenth birthday, his mother made him return home so he could start taking care of the
estate businesses. However, the young Isaac showed no interest at all in assuming his
responsibilities as a landowner; his mother, following advice by Newton’s teacher and her own
brother, allowed him to return to school to prepare his entry into college.
This occurred in June of 1661, when Newton was admitted into the Trinity College of Cambridge,
and enrolled as a servant, earning his keep in exchange for domestic services, even though his
economic situation did not require so. In there, he started receiving a conventional education in the
principles of Aristotelian philosophy (back then, the places that stood out in the field of scientific
studies were Oxford and London), but in 1663 his interest for the matters related to the
experimental research of nature was awakened, which he studied independently by himself.

A result of those independent efforts were his first notes about what would later become his Method
of Fluxions, perhaps stimulated by some of the lessons of the mathematician and theologian Isaac
Barrow; however, Newton was examined by Barrow in 1664 when aspiring for a scholarship and
didn’t get any especially favorable opinions then.

When the great plague epidemic of London was declared in 1665, Cambridge closed its doors and
Newton returned to Woolsthorpe. In March of 1666 he was reinstated into the Trinity, which
interrupted its activities again when the plague reappeared on June, and he didn’t definitively
undertake his studies again until April of 1667. In a posthumous letter, Newton himself described
the years of 1665 and 1666 as his “most prolific period of invention”, during which he “thought
about mathematics and philosophy much more than in any other time since then”.

The Method of Fluxions, the theory of colors and his first ideas about gravitational attraction,
related to the permanence of the Moon in its orbit around the Earth, were the achievements that
Newton mentioned as having been done in those years, and he himself propagated, towards the end
of his life, the anecdote that relates his first thoughts about the law of gravity with the casual
observation of an apple falling of one of the trees in his garden (Voltaire took place in propagating
the story by print, which he had learned of by Newton’s niece).

The optic

On his definitive return to Cambridge, Newton was elected as a scholar of the Trinity College in
October of 1667, and two years later he succeeded Barrow in his cathedra. During his first years of
teaching, it appears that his lessons didn’t mean any burden to him, seeing as both the complexity of
his subject and the teaching system favored class absence. In that time, Newton redacted his first
systematic expositions of infinitesimal calculus that weren’t published until some time later. In
either 1664 or 1665 he found the famous formula for the development of the power of a binomial
with any exponential, binary or fractional, although he didn’t share news of his discovery until
1676, in two letters addressed to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society; the theorem was
published for the first time in 1685 by John Wallis, the most important English mathematician prior
to Newton, duly acknowledging Newton’s importance in the finding.