Isaac Newton

About this figure

Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was born, premature and fatherless, at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire on Christmas Day 1642 by the old English calendar. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661 and took his degree in 1665, just as an outbreak of plague closed the university and sent him home to Woolsthorpe for roughly two years. That enforced retreat, later remembered as his "wonder years," was when he began working out the mathematics of calculus, his first ideas on the composition of light, and the reasoning that would become his theory of gravitation, though most of it stayed unpublished for decades. Back at Cambridge, he was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669, succeeding his teacher Isaac Barrow, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672 on the strength of his work on light and his design for a reflecting telescope.

His towering achievement, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, appeared in 1687, urged into print and partly funded by the astronomer Edmond Halley. In it Newton set out three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, showing that the same force pulling an apple to the ground also holds the Moon in its orbit and governs the planets, and deriving Kepler's earlier laws of planetary motion as a consequence. He followed it in 1704 with Opticks, a study of reflection, refraction, and the composition of color built on decades of prism experiments, which he had delayed publishing in part to avoid renewed conflict with his rival Robert Hooke. Newton's priority disputes were a recurring feature of his life: alongside the quarrel with Hooke over optics, he fought a long and bitter dispute with Gottfried Leibniz over which of them had first invented calculus.

Newton left Cambridge for London in the 1690s, becoming Warden and then, in 1699, Master of the Royal Mint, a demanding administrative post he held for the rest of his life, overseeing the recoinage of English currency and pursuing counterfeiters with the same rigor he had brought to physics. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703 and knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. Alongside his mathematics and physics, Newton devoted enormous private effort to biblical chronology and the interpretation of scriptural prophecy, work he regarded as no less serious than his natural philosophy; his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and his Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John were both published only after his death, in 1728 and 1733 respectively. He died in London on 31 March 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first scientist given that honor.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.