BIOGRAPHY OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON
What we know is a drop, What we don't know is an Ocean.
~Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton Introduction:
Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author (described in his time as a "natural philosopher") widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of all time and among the most influential scientists. He was a key figure in the philosophical revolution known as the Enlightenment. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus.
Born:
4 January 1643, Woolsthorpe Manor House, United Kingdom.
Died:
31 March 1727, Kensington, London, United Kingdom.
Resting place:
Westminster Abbey
Education:
Trinity College, Cambridge (M.A., 1668)
Known for:
Awards:
FRS (1672) Knight Bachelor (1705
SCIENTIFIC CAREER:
Fields:
Institutions:
Academic advisors:
Influences:
Influenced:
In the natural sciences and mathematics
In the humanities:
Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge
In office 1689–1690
Produced By:
Robert Brady
Succeeded By:
Edward Finch
In office 1701–1702
Produced By:
Anthony Hammond
Succeeded By:
Arthur Annesley, 5th Earl of Anglesey
12th President of the Royal Society
In office 1703–1727
Produced By:
John Somers
Succeeded By:
Hans Sloane
Master of the Mint
In office 1699–1727
1699-1727
Produced By:
Thomas Neale
Succeeded By:
John Conduitt
2nd Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
In office 1669–1702
Produced By:
Isaac Barrow
Succeeded By:
William Whiston
Political party:
Whig
Works:
Published in his lifetime
Published posthumously
Sources:
Primary
The Enlightenment:
Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history of scientific predecessors—Galileo, Boyle, and Newton principally—as the guides and guarantors of their applications of the singular concept of nature and natural law to every physical and social field of the day. In this respect, the lessons of history and the social structures built upon it could be discarded.
It is held by European philosophers of the Enlightenment and by historians of the Enlightenment that Newton's publication of the Principia was a turning point in the Scientific Revolution and started the Enlightenment. It was Newton's conception of the universe based upon natural and rationally understandable laws that became one of the seeds for Enlightenment ideology. Locke and Voltaire applied concepts of natural law to political systems advocating intrinsic rights; the physiocrats and Adam Smith applied natural conceptions of psychology and self-interest to economic systems; and sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into natural models of progress. Monboddo and Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newton's work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature.
Personality and personal relations:
Although it was claimed that he was once engaged, Newton never married. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, said that he "was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women—a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments". This now-widespread belief that he died a virgin has been commented on by writers as diverse as mathematician Charles Hutton, economist John Maynard Keynes, and physicist Carl Sagan.
Newton had a close friendship with the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, whom he met in London around 1689—some of their correspondence has survived. Their relationship came to an abrupt and unexplained end in 1693, and at the same time Newton suffered a nervous breakdown, which included sending wild accusatory letters to his friends Samuel Pepys and John Locke. His note to the latter included the charge that Locke "endeavoured to embroil me with woemen".
Newton was relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Two writers think that the sentence, written at a time when Newton and Hooke were in dispute over optical discoveries, was an oblique attack on Hooke (said to have been short and hunchbacked), rather than—or in addition to—a statement of modesty. On the other hand, the widely known proverb about standing on the shoulders of giants, published among others by seventeenth-century poet George Herbert (a former orator of the University of Cambridge and fellow of Trinity College) in his Jacula Prudentum (1651), had as its main point that "a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two", and so its effect as an analogy would place Newton himself rather than Hooke as the 'dwarf'.
In a later memoir, Newton wrote, "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
In 2015, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, called Newton "a nasty antagonist" and "a bad man to have as an enemy". He particularly noted Newton's attitude towards Robert Hooke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
It has been suggested from these and other traits, and his profound power of concentration, that Newton may have had a form of high-functioning autism, known as Asperger's syndrome.
Early life:
Newton
Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (NS 4 January 1643[a]), "an hour or two after midnight",at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. His father, also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before. Born prematurely, Newton was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug.When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough (née Blythe). Newton disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19: "Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them."Newton's mother had three children (Mary, Benjamin and Hannah) from her second marriage.
From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School, Grantham, which taught Latin and Ancient Greek and probably imparted a significant foundation of mathematics.He was removed from school and returned to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth by October 1659. His mother, widowed for the second time, attempted to make him a farmer, an occupation he hated.Henry Stokes, master at The King's School, persuaded his mother to send him back to school. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student,[18] distinguishing himself mainly by building sundials and models of windmills.
In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, on the recommendation of his uncle Rev William Ayscough, who had studied there. He started as a subsizar—paying his way by performing valet's duties—until he was awarded a scholarship in 1664, guaranteeing him four more years until he could get his MA.At that time the college's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, whom Newton supplemented with modern philosophers such as Descartes and astronomers such as Galileo and Thomas Street, through whom he learned of Kepler's work.[citation needed] He set down in his notebook a series of "Quaestiones" about mechanical philosophy as he found it. In 1665, he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus. Soon after Newton had obtained his BA degree in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague. Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student,Newton's private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the subsequent two years saw the development of his theories on calculus,optics, and the law of gravitation.
In April 1667, he returned to Cambridge and in October was elected as a fellow of Trinity. Fellows were required to become ordained priests, although this was not enforced in the restoration years and an assertion of conformity to the Church of England was sufficient. However, by 1675 the issue could not be avoided and by then his unconventional views stood in the way.Nevertheless, Newton managed to avoid it by means of special permission from Charles II.
His studies had impressed the Lucasian professor Isaac Barrow, who was more anxious to develop his own religious and administrative potential (he became master of Trinity two years later); in 1669 Newton succeeded him, only one year after receiving his MA. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1672.
