Newton Sir Isaac

Newton, Sir Isaac (1643-1727), the son of the owner of Woolsthorpe Manor, in Lincolnshire, where he was born, an exceptionally puny infant, was educated at the village school and at Grantham. He gave early indications of the tastes and talents which rendered him the greatest philosopher and mathematician of modern times. His father having died in his infancy, his mother soon removed him from school to help her with the farm, but after a time he was allowed to return to Grantham, whence he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge (1660), where he attended Professor Barrow's lectures and, by private study, carried on Wallis's researches, and discovered his binomial theorem, while by the end of 1664 he had discovered the method of fluxions. In 1665 he was driven from Cambridge by the plague, and while at Woolsthorpe he discovered the law of gravity. In 1666 he was elected a fellow of Trinity College, and discovered the composite nature of light. In 1672 he became a fellow of the Royal Society, and became involved in a controversy on his discoveries. He published his great Treatise on Optics in 1704, having already, in 1686, finished his magnum opus, Philosophicce Nataralis Pr'mcipia Mathematica. In 1688 he became member for the university of Cambridge. In 1692 the results of several years' studies in chemistry were destroyed owing to his pet dog overturning a lighted candle, which lamentable accident seriously affected Newton's health and energy. In 1696 he was appointed Warden of the Mint, and rendered great service in the calculations and experiments required for the general recoinage, and in 1699 he became Master of the Mint. Newton held the Lucasian professorship of mathematics in the university of Cambridge from 1669 to 1702, and was for some time M.P.

for Cambridge. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703, and in 1705 was knighted. Though he gave up science for the last ten years of his life, he remained in good health until his eightieth year, after which he gradually succumbed to the stone. His other published works include Arithmetica Universalis (1707 and 1712), Analysis per Equationes Numero Terminoruvi Infinitas (1711), and Methodus Differentialis. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his statue by Roubiliac stands in Trinity College Chapel. For the controversy with Leibnitz (q.v.) Newton was not at all responsible, but was at last forced to defend his claim to priority in the discovery of the principles on which were based his method of fluxions, and Leibnitz's. [Calculus, Differential and Integral.]