Isaac Newton was born (according to the
Julian calendar in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (
NS 4 January 1643
), at
Woolsthorpe Manor in
Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a
hamlet in the county of
Lincolnshire.
He was born three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton.
Born
prematurely, he was a small child; his mother
Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a
quart
mug (≈ 1.1 litres).
When Newton was three, his mother remarried and
went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabus Smith, leaving
her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough.
The
young Isaac disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards
his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins
committed up to the age of 19: "Threatening my father and mother Smith
to burn them and the house over them." Her mother had no children from
her second marriage.
Although it was claimed that he was once engaged,
Newton never married.
From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at
The King's School, Grantham.
He was removed from school, and by October 1659, he was to be found at
Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, where his mother, widowed by now for a second time, attempted to make a farmer of him. He hated farming.
Henry Stokes, master at the King's School, persuaded his mother to send
him back to school so that he might complete his education.
Motivated
partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the
top-ranked student.
The Cambridge psychologist
Simon Baron-Cohen considers it "fairly certain" that Newton had
Asperger syndrome.
[13]
In June 1661, he was admitted to
Trinity College, Cambridge as a
sizar – a sort of work-study role.
At that time, the college's teachings were based on those of
Aristotle, whom Newton supplemented with modern philosophers, such as
Descartes, and
astronomers such as
Copernicus,
Galileo, and
Kepler. In 1665, he discovered the generalised
binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became
infinitesimal calculus.
Soon after Newton had obtained his degree in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the
Great Plague.
Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student,
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.
In 1667, he returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Trinity.
Fellows were required to become ordained priests, something Newton
desired to avoid due to his unorthodox views. Luckily for Newton, there
was no specific deadline for ordination, and it could be postponed
indefinitely.
The problem became more severe later when Newton was
elected for the prestigious
Lucasian Chair.
For such a significant appointment, ordaining normally could not be
dodged. Nevertheless, Newton managed to avoid it by means of a special
permission from
Charles II (see "Middle years" section below).
In a manuscript he wrote in 1704 in which he describes his attempts to
extract scientific information from the Bible, he estimated that the
world would end no earlier than 2060.
In predicting this he said, "This I
mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a
stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently
predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred
prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."
