biography of isaac newton

ISAAC NEWTON

Isaac Newton was born on 25 December at Woolsthrope Manor in Woolsthrope-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. At the time of Newton’s birth, England had not adopted the latest papal calendar and therefore his date of birth was recorded as Christmas Day, 25 December 1642. Newton was born three months after the death of his father. Born prematurally, he was a small child, his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug. When Newton was tree, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barbanus Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and held some up to the age of 19: Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the haouse over them. 

According to E.T. Bell and H. Eves : 

Newton began his scholling in the village schools and was later sent to The King’s School, Grantham, whwere be became the top student in the school. At King’s, he lodged with the local apothecary, William Clarke and eventually became engaded to the apothecary’s stepdaughter, Anne Storer, before he went off to the Uneversity of Cambridge at the age of 19. As Newton became engrossed in his studies, the romance cooled and Miss Storer married someone else. It is said he kept a warm memory of this love, but Newton had no other recorded “sweet-hearts” and never married. 

There are rumours that he remained a virgin. However, Bell and Eves’ sources for this claim, William Stukeley and Mrs. Vincent (the former Miss Storer- actually named Katherine, not Anne), merely say that Newton entertained “a passion” for Storer while he lodged at the Clarke house. 

From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King’s School., Grantham (where his signature can still be seen upon a library window sill). He was removed from school, and by October 1659, he was to be found at Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, where his mother, windowed by now for a second time, attempted to make a farmer of him. He was, by later report of his contemporaries, thoroughly unhappy with the work. It appears to have been Henry Stokes, master at the King’s School, who persuased his mother to send him back to school so that he might complete his education. This he did at the age of eighteen, achieving an admirable final report. 

In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge. According to John Stillwell, he entered Trinity as a sizar. At that time, the college’s teachings were based on those of Aristotle, but Newton preferred to read the more advanced ideas of modern philosophers such as Descartes and astronomers such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. In 1665, he discovered the generalized binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that would later become calculus. Soon after Newton had obtained his degree in August of 1665, the Uneversity closed down as a precaution against the Great Plague. Altough he had been undistinguished as a Cambridgestudent, Newton’s private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the subsequent two years saw the development of his theories on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation.