Newton was born in Wools Thorpe, Lincolnshire, in England. His dad died before he was born, when he was three years old, his mother remarried. At age ten he was sent to grammar school. While at school he lived at the house of a pharmacist named Clark, from whom he may have acquired his lifelong interest in chemical operations. However, Newton was inattentive in school. In 1656 Newton’s mother, on the death of her second husband, returned to Wools Thorpe and took her son out of school in the hope of making him a farmer. Newton showed no talent, or interest in farming. Legend tells it that when he should have been at the market in Grantham, he was under a hedge in deep study. Newton’s former teacher at Grantham recognized the boy’s intellectual gifts and persuaded Newton’s mother to allow him to go to the University of Cambridge. In June 1661 Trinity College at Cambridge admitted Newton as a subsizar (a student required to perform various domestic services). His studies included arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, and, later, astronomy and optics. In October 1667, soon after his return to Cambridge, Newton was elected to a minor fellowship at Trinity College. During this time he turned his attention to building a reflecting telescope, or a telescope that uses mirrors instead of lenses. In 1669 Newton gave his Trinity mathematics professor Isaac Barrow an important manuscript, which is usually known by its shortened Latin title, De Analysi. When Barrow retired in 1669, he suggested to the college that Newton succeed him. Newton became the new professor of mathematics and chose optics as the subject of his first course of lectures. In early 1672 Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Soon after, Newton submitted a paper on the composite nature of white light. He received many criticisms on this, but his strongest was from Robert Hooke on Newton's theories of gravitation. Hooke insisted that he had given Newton his ideas; they fought many times over this. Newton eventually stopped publishing his work as a result. Besides his scientific work, Newton did work in theology, chronology, alchemy, and chemistry. In 1725 Newton moved from London to Kensington for health reasons. He died there on March 20, 1727. He was buried in Westminster Abbey; the first scientist to be given such an honor.
Sources
More on Newton's Life
Pictures of Newton
