![]() While sitting in the garden there one day, he saw an apple fall from a tree, providing him with the inspiration to eventually formulate his law of universal gravitation. In 1665, following an outbreak of the bubonic plague in England, Cambridge University closed its doors, forcing Newton to return home to Woolsthorpe Manor. The Black Death inadvertently set the stage for one of his most famous insights. After finishing his coursework there, Newton left for Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1661, putting farming behind him for good. Eventually, Newton’s mother was persuaded by her son’s former headmaster in Grantham (where, incidentally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was born in 1925) to allow him to return to school. The teen was uninterested in the job and fared poorly at it. However, at age 15 or 16, he was ordered to quit school by his mother (then widowed for a second time) and return to Woolsthorpe Manor to become a farmer. Initially, he wasn’t a strong student however, as the story goes, following a confrontation with a school bully Newton started applying himself in an effort to best the other boy and transformed into a top student. Newton’s mother wanted him to be a farmer.Īt age 12, Newton was enrolled in a school in Grantham, where he boarded at the home of the local apothecary because the daily walk from Woolsthorpe Manor was too long. He even remained silent about some of his scientific and mathematical discoveries for years, if he published them at all. As a teen, he made a list of his past sins and among them was: “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.” As an adult, Newton immersed himself in his work, had no hobbies and never married. The experience of being abandoned by his mother scarred Newton and likely played a role in shaping his solitary, untrusting nature. Newton’s mother went to live with her new husband in another village, leaving behind her young son in the care of his grandparents. When Newton was three, his mother wed a wealthy clergyman, Barnabas Smith, who didn’t want a stepson. Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day 1642 at his family’s home, Woolsthorpe Manor, near the town of Grantham, England, several months after the death of his father, an illiterate farmer. His unhappy childhood helped shape his secretive personality. Thus some modern writers have claimed that he was gay or bisexual, but the truth will probably never be known.1. He did have very close relationships with male friends, although there is no evidence that these were sexual. Newton never married, and is sometimes claimed to have died a virgin. In mathematics, he invented calculus in parallel with Leibniz. In optics, he was the first to show that white light is made up of a mixture of the colours of the spectrum. ![]() The Newtonian explanation of the world was unchallenged until Einstein developed the theory of relativity in the early 20th century, and is still an adequate approximation to the real world for most everyday purposes. Newton's laws of motion and theory of universal gravitation revolutionised the understanding of the physical world, and explained how the same force that makes an apple fall from a tree accounts for the motions of the planets. This would normally have required him to be ordained a priest of the Church of England, but Newton obtained a special permission from King Charles II to be appointed without being ordained, as his religious views were somewhat orthodox. In 1669 he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He went to school at Grantham, and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1661. Newton was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in Lincolnshire. Sir Isaac Newton by Kneller Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was an English scientist and mathematician, sometimes considered the greatest scientist who ever lived.
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