NEWTON, SIR ISAAC (1642–1727), English natural philosopher, was born on the 25th of December 1642 (o.s.), at Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in the parish of Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, about 6 m. from Grantham. His father (also Isaac Newton) who farmed a small freehold property of his own, died before his son’s birth, a few months after his marriage to Hannah Ayscough, a daughter of James Ayscough of Market-Overton. When Newton was little more than two years old his mother married Barnabas Smith, rector of North Witham. Of this marriage there was issue, Benjamin, Mary and Hannah Smith, and to their children Sir Isaac Newton subsequently left the greater part of his property. After having acquired the rudiments of education at two small schools in hamlets close to Woolsthorpe, Newton was sent at the age of twelve to the grammar school of Grantham. While attending Grantham school Newton lived in the house of Mr Clark, an apothecary of that town. According to his own confession he was far from industrious, and stood very low in his class. An unprovoked attack from the boy next above him led to a fight, in which Newton’s pluck gave him the victory. This success seems to have led him to greater exertions, and he rose to be the head boy of the school. He displayed very early a taste and an aptitude for mechanical contrivances. He made windmills, water-clocks, kites and dials, and he is said to have invented a four-wheeled carriage which was to be moved by the rider. In 1656 Mr Smith died, and Newton’s mother came back with her three children to Woolsthorpe. Newton was then in his fifteenth year, and, as his mother in all probability intended him to be a farmer, he was taken away from school. He was frequently sent on market days to Grantham with an old and trusty servant, who made all the purchases, while Newton spent his time among the books in Mr Clark’s house. It soon became apparent to Newton’s relatives that they were making a great mistake in attempting to turn him into a farmer, and he was therefore sent back again to school at Grantham. His mother’s brother, William Ayscough, the rector of Burton Coggles, the next parish, was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and when he found that Newton’s mind was wholly devoted to mechanical and mathematical problems, he urged upon Mrs Smith the desirability of sending her son to his own college. He was accordingly admitted a member of Trinity College on the 5th of June 1661, as a subsizar, and was matriculated on the 8th of July. We have scarcely any information as to his attainments when he commenced residence, and very little as to his studies as an undergraduate. It is known that while still at Woolsthorpe Sanderson’s Logic had been read by him to such purpose that his tutor at Trinity College excused his attendance at a course of lectures on that subject. Newton tells us himself that, when he had purchased a book on astrology at Stourbridge fair, a fair held close to Cambridge, he was unable, on account of his ignorance of trigonometry, to understand a figure of the heavens which was drawn in this book. He therefore bought an English edition of Euclid with an index of propositions at the end of it, and, having turned to two or three which he thought likely to remove his difficulties, he found them so self-evident that he put aside Euclid “as a trifling book,” and applied himself to the study of Descartes’s Geometry. It is reported that in his examination for a scholarship at Trinity, to which he was elected on the 28th of April 1664, he was examined in Euclid by Dr Isaac Barrow, who formed a poor opinion of his knowledge, and that in consequence Newton was led to read the Elements again with care, and thereby to form a more favourable estimate of Euclid’s merits.
The study of Descartes’s Geometry seems to have inspired Newton with a love of the subject, and to have introduced him to the higher mathematics. In a small commonplace book, bearing on the seventh page the date of January 1663/1664, there are several articles on angular sections, and the squaring of curves and “crooked lines that may be squared,” several calculations about musical notes, geometrical propositions from Francis Vieta and Frans van Schooten, annotations out of Wallis’s Arithmetic of Infinities, together with observations on refraction, on the grinding of “spherical optic glasses,” on the errors of lenses and the method of rectifying them, and on the extraction of all kinds of roots, particularly those “in affected powers.” And in this same commonplace book the following entry made by Newton himself, many years afterwards, gives a further account of the nature of his work during the period when he was an undergraduate:—
“July 4, 1699.—By consulting an account of my expenses at Cambridge, in the years 1663 and 1664, I find that in the year 1664 a little before Christmas, I, being then Senior Sophister, bought Schooten’s Miscellanies and Cartes’ Geometry (having read this Geometry and Oughtred’s Clavis clean over half a year before), and borrowed Wallis’s works, and by consequence made these annotations out of Schooten and Wallis, in winter between the years 1664 and 1665. At such time I found the method of Infinite Series; and in summer 1665, being forced from Cambridge by the plague, I computed the area of the Hyperbola at Boothby, in Lincolnshire, to two and fifty figures by the same method.”
That Newton must have begun early to make careful observations of natural phenomena is sufficiently testified by the following remarks about halos, which appear in his Optics, book ii. part iv. obs. 13:—
“The like Crowns appear sometimes about the moon; for in the beginning of the Year 1664, February 19th, at night, I saw two such Crowns about her. The Diameter of the first or innermost was about three Degrees, and that of the second about five Degrees and an half. Next about the moon was a Circle of white, and next about that the inner Crown, which was of a bluish green within next the white, and of a yellow and red without, and next about these Colours were blue and green on the inside of the Outward Crown, and red on the outside of it. At the same time there appear’d a Halo about 22 Degrees 35′ distant from the center of the moon. It was elliptical, and its long Diameter was perpendicular to the Horizon, verging below farthest from the moon.”
In January 1665 Newton took the degree of B.A. The persons appointed (in conjunction with the proctors, John Slade of Catharine Hall, and Benjamin Pulleyn of Trinity College, Newton’s tutor) to examine the questionists were John Eachard of Catharine Hall and Thomas Gipps of Trinity College. It is a curious accident that we have no information about the respective merits of the candidates for a degree in this year, as the “ordo senioritatis” of the bachelors of arts for the year is omitted in the “Grace Book.”
It is supposed that it was in 1665 that the method of fluxions first occurred to Newton’s mind. There are several papers still existing in Newton’s handwriting bearing dates 1665 and 1666 in which the method is described, in some of which dotted or dashed letters are used to represent fluxions, and in some of which the method is explained without the use of dotted letters.
Both in 1665 and in 1666 Trinity College was dismissed on account of the plague. On each occasion it was agreed, as appears by entries in the “Conclusion Book” of the college, bearing dates August 7th, 1665, and June 22nd, 1666, and signed by the master of the college, Dr Pearson, that all fellows and scholars who were dismissed on account of the pestilence be allowed one month’s commons. Newton must have left college before August 1665, as his name does not appear in the list of those who received extra commons on that occasion, and he tells us himself in the extract from his commonplace book already quoted that he was “forced from Cambridge by the plague” in the summer of that year. He was elected a fellow of his college on the 1st of October 1667. There were nine vacancies, one of which was caused by the death of Abraham Cowley in the previous summer, and the nine successful candidates were all of the same academical standing. A few weeks after his election to a fellowship Newton went to Lincolnshire, and did not return to Cambridge till the February following. On the 16th of March 1668 he took his degree of M.A.
During the years 1666 to 1669 Newton’s studies were of a very varied kind. It is known that he purchased prisms and lenses on two or three several occasions, and also chemicals and a furnace, apparently for chemical experiments; but he also employed part of his time on the theory of fluxions and other branches of pure mathematics. He wrote a paper Analysis per Equationes Numero Terminorum Infinitas, which he put, probably in June 1669, into the hands of Isaac Barrow (then Lucasian professor of mathematics), at the same time giving him
