Isaac Newton's Life






Isaac Newton was born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire on January 4th, 1643. Isaac Newton came from a family of farmers but never knew his father, also named Isaac Newton, who died three months before his son was born. Although Isaac's father owned property and animals, which made him quite a wealthy man, he was completely uneducated and could not sign his own name. Isaac's mother, Hannah Ayscough, remarried Barnabas Smith, the minister of the church at North Witham, a nearby village, when Isaac was two years old. The young child was then left in the care of his grandmother, Margery Ayscough at Woolsthorpe and was basically treated as an orphan. Isaac did not have a happy childhood, considering the fact that his grandfather James Ayscough was never mentioned by Isaac in later life and the fact that James left nothing to Isaac in his will, made when the boy was ten years old, suggests there was not a loving connection between them. He even didn't like his step-father andd his mother. He threatened his step-father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.

Upon the death of his stepfather in 1653, Newton lived in an extended family consisting of his mother, his grandmother, one half-brother, and two half-sisters. From shortly after this time, Isaac began attending the Free Grammar School in Grantham. He never seemed very interested in school, so his mother decided it was time for her eldest son, Issac, to help her manage her affairs and estate. His uncle, William Ayscough, decided that Isaac should prepare for entering an university and, having persuaded his mother that this was the right thing to do, Isaac was allowed to return to the Free Grammar School in Grantham in 1660 to complete his school education. Newton entered his uncle's old College, Trinity College Cambridge, on June 5, 1661. His aim was to achieve 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. He was introduced to the most advanced mathematical texts of his day and fascinated. Newton's interest in mathematics began in the autumn of 1663 when he bought an astrology book at a fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in it. Newton was elected a scholar on April 28, 1664 and received his bachelor's degree in April 1665. While Newton was still under 25 years old, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy.

He laid the foundations for differential and integral calculus, several years before its independent discovery by Leibniz. The 'method of fluxions', as he termed it, was based on his crucial insight that the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure to differentiating it. Taking differentiation as the basic operation, Newton produced simple analytical methods that unified many separate techniques previously developed to solve apparently unrelated problems such as finding areas, tangents, the lengths of curves and the maxima and minima of functions. In 1672, Newton published his first scientific paper on light and color in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. All these achievements led to the contribution of Newton's Three Laws of Motion that help us understand numerous concepts today.




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