Isaac Newton

About this Mind

Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire in 1642, after his father's death, and was largely raised by his grandmother after his mother remarried. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661 and, while the university was closed by plague in 1665-66, worked intensively on mathematics, light and motion. In 1669 he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. His reflecting telescope and his 1672 paper on light and colours brought him into the Royal Society and into a lasting quarrel with Robert Hooke. Prompted by Edmond Halley, he wrote the Principia (1687), which brought the motions of the heavens and of bodies on Earth under one law of gravitation while declining to feign hypotheses about its cause. He moved to London in 1696 to run the Mint, became President of the Royal Society in 1703, published Opticks in 1704 and was knighted in 1705. His bitter disputes with Leibniz and Flamsteed belong to these years, as do the private alchemical and theological studies that filled much of his life. He died in Kensington in March 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.