Isaac Newton

(1642-1727)

Isaac Newton wrote, “. . . to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, 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.” History, of course, sees him very differently. Newton is revered as one of the first to develop the calculus and as the founder of the sciences of dynamics and spectroscopy. He is often credited with inaugurating the Age of Reason.

Newton was born prematurely in 1642 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, in England. His mother claimed that he was so small at birth that he would have fit in a quart mug; in fact, he was not expected to live. Newton’s father died several months before Isaac’s birth. When Newton’s mother remarried two years later, he was sent to live with his grandmother on an isolated farm. The loneliness and ill health that marred Newton’s childhood led to a lifelong interest in intellectual pursuits, to the exclusion of all else. He never married, cared nothing for his appearance, and frequently forgot to eat. His friends were few; his later years were tarnished by bitter quarrels.

Because his physical frailty barred him from participation in the village children’s games, the young Newton occupied himself with solitary pastimes. He particularly enjoyed building miniature working models of carriages, waterwheels, and the like. This skill, developed in childhood, served him well when later in life he sought to construct experimental devices with lenses to prove his theories on the properties of light.

Newton was an unremarkable student until the day when he was kicked in the stomach by the school bully. Newton was, surprisingly, able to defeat his opponent, apparently by strength of will if not of body. Having thus tasted victory, Newton determined to surpass his rival, a highranking scholar, at his studies as well. Within a short time Newton rose to the head of his class. This was nearly the end of his academic success. Newton’s mother’s second husband died when Newton was 14 years old, and Newton was withdrawn from school to work on his mother’s farm. It soon became apparent, however, that this was an occupation for which Newton was woefully unsuited. He had no interest in crops or stock, preferring instead to read or dream. Newton’s mother acknowledged defeat: in 1661, when Newton was 18 years old, she permitted him to enter Trinity College at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, Newton came to the attention of Isaac Barrow, a professor of mathematics and a gifted scientist and classicist. Newton had done nothing to distinguish himself academically during his first years at the university; nevertheless, Barrow recognized the young man’s “unparalleled genius.” Soon after Newton received his bachelor’s degree in 1665, Barrow relinquished his academic post and was instrumental in securing the professorship for Newton. Thus by the time he was 26 years old, Newton had attained a position of distinction that left him free to pursue his own interests, since his responsibilities were not very taxing. He was required to lecture only once each week on some aspect of mathematics, astronomy, geography, or optics, and to devote two hours per week to consultation with students.

The subject on which he chose to lecture that first year was optics. Newton had been drawn to the investigation of light and colors during the previous 18 months, spent at his home in Woolsthorpe when an outbreak of the plague necessitated the temporary closing of Trinity. During that same period, he also developed the fundamentals of calculus and formulated his law of universal gravitation! It has been suggested that those 18 months were the most productive in all the history of creative imagination. Unfortunately, a fear of criticism restrained Newton from immediately publishing his discoveries.

In 1672, Newton submitted his reflecting telescope, an invention arising from his study of light, to the Royal Society of London. This community of scientists immediately recognized the value of Newton’s work and appointed him a Fellow of the Royal Society, England’s highest scientific honor.

Thus encouraged, Newton published through the Royal Society a report of his analysis of light and color. The paper failed to win for him the accolade he craved; instead, the Royal Society was besieged with objections. At first, Newton tried to explain his conclusions to his detractors. When his efforts failed to convince them, he grew angry and bitter, and resolved to publish nothing more.

For more than a decade Newton labored in relative obscurity at Cambridge, until the day in 1684 when he was visited by Edmund Halley, the celebrated British astronomer and mathematician. Halley and his associates Robert Hooke and Christian Huygens had been hindered in their research by their inability to apply Johannes Kepler’s laws to determine the orbit of a planet, and sought Newton’s opinion. Newton immediately supplied Halley with the answer, that the orbit was an ellipse.

From this, Halley was able to deduce that Newton had discovered the law of gravity, and begged him for his calculations. At Halley’s tactful but insistent urging Newton was persuaded to publish his theorems and proofs, with Halley bearing the cost of printing. The resulting masterpiece, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, met with instant and virtually universal acclaim upon its release in 1687.

The Principia, as it is known, is comprised of three books. The first defines Newton’s three laws of motion and describes the importance of several laws of force; the second concerns motion in various types of fluids; and the third proves the existence of universal gravitation. Taken together, the three books constitute an enormous body of scientific knowledge with extraordinary significance.

Newton appears to have suffered some sort of emotional collapse following the publication of the Principia. He grew increasingly suspicious and argumentative, and all scientific inquiry ceased.

In 1696, Newton terminated his position at Cambridge. Through the influence of the English philosopher John Locke, Newton was appointed Warden and later Master of the Royal Mint in London, a lucrative government post.

Unfortunately, Newton’s free time was spent not in the pursuit of knowledge, but in acrimony. He used the influence of his position as president of the Royal Society, an honor bestowed on him in 1703, to launch a brutal attack on the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom Newton unjustly accused of plagiarizing his invention of calculus. History contends that Leibniz arrived at his discovery of calculus independently, using the same sources as Newton. Since Newton had ignored his mentor Isaac Barrow’s suggestion that he publish his notes at the time they were written, there was little substantiation for Newton’s claim of priority. Newton also engaged in bitter and protracted battles with Hooke and the astronomer John Flamsteed. It has been noted that a quarrel accompanied virtually all of Newton’s achievements.

Though the last 30 years of his life were barren of discovery, Newton was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 in recognition of his inestimable contribution to scientific knowledge. He was buried in Westminster Abbey after his death at the age of 84 in March, 1727.

Links

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Newton.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

References

• Ball, W. W. Rouse. A Short Account of the History of Mathematics. 1908. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960.
• Boyer, Carl B. A History of Mathematics. 2d ed., rev. Uta C. Merzbach. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1991.
• Cohen, I. Bernard. “Isaac Newton.” In Mathematics in the Modern World, edited by Morris Kline, 40–43. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1968.
• Hooper, Alfred. Makers of Mathematics. New York: Random House, Inc., 1948.
Simmons, George F. Calculus Gems: Brief Lives and Memorable Mathematics. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992.
• Struik, Dirk J. A Concise History of Mathematics. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987.