Newton Born: The Mind That Decoded the Universe

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, by the Gregorian calendar, in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in Lincolnshire, England. His father, an illiterate farmer, had died three months before his birth. His mother remarried when Newton was three, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandmother, an abandonment he never forgave. She later pulled him out of school at twelve to run the family farm. He was catastrophically bad at farming: the sheep wandered, the crops went untended, and the fences fell apart. His uncle, recognizing that the boy had no interest in anything except reading and mathematics, convinced his mother to send him back to school. Newton entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen, graduated without particular distinction, and then retreated to Woolsthorpe during the plague years of 1665 and 1666 when the university closed. In those eighteen months of isolation, working alone in his family's farmhouse, he developed the foundations of calculus, formulated the theory of universal gravitation, and conducted the prism experiments that proved white light is composed of all visible colors. He was twenty-three and twenty-four years old. He returned to Cambridge, was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at twenty-six, and spent much of the next three decades feuding with Robert Hooke over priority in optics and with Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of calculus. He published the Principia Mathematica in 1687, a work that unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics and remained the foundation of physics until Einstein. The hard part had been done in a farmhouse during a plague.