3 Somewhat later, on the occasion of his election as scholar, Newton was reportedly found deficient in Euclid when examined by Barrow. He also began Euclid, which he reportedly found “trifling,” throwing it aside for Schooten’s second Latin edition of Descartes’s Géométrie. He was admitted a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, on 5 June 1661 as a subsizar, and became scholar in 1664 and Bachelor of Arts in 1665.Īmong the books that Newton studied while an undergraduate was Kepler’s “optics” (presumably the Dioptrice, reprinted in London in 1653). With the encouragement of John Stokes, master of the Grantham school, and William Ayscough, Newton’s uncle and rector of Burton Coggles, it was therefore decided to prepare the youth for the university. He was, however, uninterested in farm chores, and absent-minded and lackadaisical. He then attended the King’s School in Grantham, but his mother withdrew him from school upon her return to Woolsthorpe, intending to make him a farmer.
His early education was in the dame schools at Skillington and Stoke, beginning perhaps when he was five. 2 He scratched diagrams and an architectural drawing (now revealed and preserved) on the walls and window edges of the Woolsthorpe house, and made many other drawings of birds, animals, men, ships, and plants. He is reported to have constructed a model of a mill (powered by a mouse), clocks, “lanthorns,” and fiery kites, which he sent aloft to the fright of his neighbors, being inspired by John Bate’s Mysteries of Nature and Art. In his youth Newton was interested in mechanical contrivances. That he was, moreover, resentful of his mother’s second marriage and jealous of her second husband may be documented by at least one entry in a youthful catalogue of sins, written in shorthand in 1662, which records “Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.” 1 Newton’s personality was no doubt influenced by his never having known his father. One niece, Catherine, kept house for Newton in the London years and married John Conduitt, who succeeded Newton as master of the Mint. Their surviving children, Newton’s four nephews and four nieces, were his heirs. His stepfather, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, died in 1653 and Newton’s mother returned to Woolsthorpe with her three younger children, a son and two daughters. Newton’s mother, Hannah (née Ayscough), remarried, and left her three-year-old son in the care of his aged maternal grandmother. He grew up in his father’s house, which still stands in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. He later said that he could have fitted into a quart mug at birth. He was born prematurely, and there was considerable concern for his survival. Newton was descended from yeomen on both sides: there is no record of any notable ancestor. Isaac Newton was born a posthumous child, his father having been buried the preceding 6 October. Mathematics, dynamics, celestial mechanics, astronomy, optics, natural philosophy. Woolsthorpe, England, 25 December 1642 d.
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