Sir Issac Newton

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Newton, Isaac (1642-1727)Newton, Isaac (1642-1727)

Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, a premature infant not expected to live. His father (of the same name) had died just three months before. His mother, Hannah Ayscough Newton, remarried when he was three, and left him with his grandmother until her second husband died, in 1653, when Newton was 11. He was educated at King's School, Grantham, and it was assumed he would continue in the farming tradition of his family, but finally his mother became convinced that he should be prepared for entry to university, and in 1661 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a poor scholar who would have to earn his keep by doing menial tasks for the Fellows.

Newton showed no particular promise in his early years at Cambridge, but Isaac Barrow, who held the Lucasian chair of mathematics, gave him much encouragement. Newton took his degree without distinction (in 1665), and would have prepared for his MA, but in 1664 the Great Plague broke out in London, and the university was closed down the following year.

At home during the plague years, he studied the nature of light and the construction of telescopes. By a variety of experiments upon sunlight refracted through a prism, he concluded that rays of light which differ in color differ also in refrangibility - a discovery which suggested that the indistinctness of the image formed by the object-glass of telescopes was due to the different-colored rays of light being brought to a focus at different distances. He concluded (rightly for an object-glass consisting of a single lens) that it was impossible to produce a distinct image, and was thus led to the construction of reflecting telescopes, perfected by William Herschel and the Earl of Rosse. At the same time, he was working out his ideas on planetary motion.

On his return to Cambridge (1667), Newton became a Fellow of Trinity College, and, in 1668, took his MA. In the fo...