Electronic edition published by Cultural Heritage Langauge Technologies (with permission from Charles Scribners and Sons) and funded by the National Science Foundation International Digital Libraries Program. This text has been proofread to a low degree of accuracy. It was converted to electronic form using data entry.
NEWTON, ISAAC (b. Woolsthorpe, England,
25 December 1642; d. London, England, 20 March
1727), mathematics, dynamics, celestial mechanics,
astronomy, optics, natural philosophy.
Newton was descended from yeomen on both sides:
there is no record of any notable ancestor. He was born
prematurely, and there was considerable concern for
his survival. He later said that he could have fitted into
a quart mug at birth. He grew up in his father's
house, which still stands in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe,
near Grantham in Lincolnshire.
Newton's mother, Hannah (née Ayscough), remarried,
and left her three-year-old son in the care of his
aged maternal grandmother. His stepfather, the
Reverend Barnabas Smith, died in 1653; and Newton's
mother returned to Woolsthorpe with her three
younger children, a son and two daughters. Their
surviving children, Newton's four nephews and
four nieces, were his heirs. One niece, Catherine, kept
house for Newton in the London years and married
John Conduitt, who succeeded Newton as master of
the Mint.
Newton's personality was no doubt influenced by his
never having known his father. That he was, moreover,
resentful of his mother's second marriage and jealous
of her second husband may be documented by at
least one entry in a youthful catalogue of sins, written
in shorthand in 1662, which records “Threatning my
father and mother Smith to burne them and the house
over them.”1
In his youth Newton was interested in mechanical
contrivances. He is reported to have constructed
a model of a mill (powered by a mouse), clocks,
“lanthorns,” and fiery kites, which he sent aloft to the
fright of his neighbors, being inspired by John Bate's
Mysteries of Nature and Art.2 He scratched diagrams
and an architectural drawing (now revealed and
preserved) on the walls and window edges of the
Woolsthorpe house, and made many other drawings
of birds, animals, men, ships, and plants. His early
education was in the dame schools at Skillington and
Stoke, beginning perhaps when he was five. He then
attended the King's School in Grantham, but his
mother withdrew him from school upon her return to
Woolsthorpe, intending to make him a farmer.
He was, however, uninterested in farm chores,
and absent-minded and lackadaisical. With the encouragement
of John Stokes, master of the Grantham
school, and William Ayscough, Newton's uncle and
rector of Burton Coggles, it was therefore decided to
prepare the youth for the university. He was admitted
a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, on 5 June
1661 as a subsizar, and became scholar in 1664 and
Bachelor of Arts in 1665.
Among the books that Newton studied while an
undergraduate was Kepler's “optics” (presumably
the Dioptrice, reprinted in London in 1653). He also
began Euclid, which he reportedly found “trifling,”
throwing it aside for Schooten's second Latin edition
of Descartes's Géométrie.3 Somewhat later,
on the
occasion of his election as scholar, Newton was
reportedly found deficient in Euclid when examined by
Barrow.4 He read Descartes's Géométrie in a
borrowed
copy of the Latin version (Amsterdam, 1659-1661)
with commentary by Frans van Schooten, in which
there were also letters and tracts by de Beaune, Hudde,
Heuraet, de Witt, and Schooten himself. Other books
that he studied at this time included Oughtred's
Clavis, Wallis' Arithmetica infinitorum, Walter
Charleton's compendium of Epicurus and Gassendi,
Digby's Two Essays, Descartes's Principia philosophiae
(as well as the Latin edition of his letters), Galileo's
Dialogo (in Salusbury's English version)--but
not, apparently, the Discorsi--Magirus' compendium
of Scholastic philosophy, Wing and Streete
on astronomy, and some writings of Henry
More (himself a native of Grantham), with
whom Newton became acquainted in Cambridge.
Somewhat later, Newton read and annotated Sprat's
History of the Royal Society, the early Philosophical
Transactions, and Hooke's Micrographia.
Notebooks that survive from Newton's years at
Trinity include an early one5 containing notes in
Greek on Aristotle's Organon and Ethics, with a
supplement based on the commentaries by Daniel
Stahl, Eustachius, and Gerard Vossius. This, together
with his reading of Magirus and others, gives evidence
of Newton's grounding in Scholastic rhetoric and
syllogistic logic. His own reading in the moderns was
organized into a collection of “Questiones quaedam
philosophicae,”6 which further indicate that he had
also read Charleton and Digby. He was familiar with
the works of Glanville and Boyle, and no doubt
studied Gassendi's epitome of Copernican astronomy,
which was then published together with Galileo's
Sidereus nuncius and Kepler's Dioptrice.7
Little is known of Newton's friends during his
college days other than his roommate and onetime
amanuensis Wickins. The rooms he occupied are not
known for certain; and we have no knowledge as to
the subject of his thesis for the B.A., or where he
stood academically among the group who were
graduated with him. He himself did record what
were no doubt unusual events in his undergraduate
career: “Lost at cards twice” and “At the Taverne
twice.”
For eighteen months, after June 1665, Newton is
supposed to have been in Lincolnshire, while the
University was closed because of the plague. During
this time he laid the foundations of his work in
mathematics, optics, and astronomy or celestial
mechanics. It was formerly believed that all of these