Isaac Newton Biography

1645: His mother married again (a wealthy elderly clergyman). Left Isaac Newton behind with his grandmother.

1653: After her husdand's death, Isaac mother came back with her three children.

1655: Isaac Newton went away to the Grammar School in Grantham (He had a room by the local apothecary. He was fascinated by the chemicals).

1659: At age seventeen, it was planned that Isaac Newton came back home to look after the farm. It was a total failure. His mother's brother, a clergyman who'd been an undergraduate at Cambridge, persuaded his sister to let Isaac Newton go to university.

1661: He went to Trinity College in Cambridge. To pay the college, and during three years, Isaac waited
tables and cleaned rooms for the fellows and the wealthier students.

1664: Was elected a scholar. This guaranteed him four years of financial support.

1665: The plague was spreading across Europe. It reached Cambridge in the summer of 1665 and the university closed. He has to return home where he concentrated on mathematics and physics. He started to develop the binomial theorem. At the end of 1665, he developed the methods for finding slope of curves which we call "Differential Calculus".

1666: Completed his invention of calculus (method of finding areas of curved regions: The Integral Calculus). Experimented as well with light and began to think about gravity. He completed his studies at Cambridge. Stayed there as a professor of mathematics.

1672: Presented his first reflecting telescope to the Royal Society. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He was urged to publish his ideas on the motion of planets.

1687: Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) contained his laws of motion and gravity.

1692-1693: During this period Isaac Newton had had a period of grave nervous breakdown (owed possibly to the death of his mother). He lived in a state of prostration and paronaia and was subject to hallucinations. It took him three years before recovery.

1696: Isaac Newton left Cambridge. Took charge of the Bristish Mint in London.

1699: He is promoted member of the Royal Society Council.

1701: He decides to quit its Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge.(a post later held by Stephen Hawking).

1703: Became president of the Royal Society. He remained there for the rest of his life.

1704: He wrote a full account of his study of light Opticks.

1724: Isaac Newton is gravely ill.

1727: He recovers hardly from a crisis of gout but goes to London to preside a meeting of the Royal Society.

He is terribly tired by this journey. On returning to Kensington he has to remain in bed.

He died March 20th, 1727. He was 85 years old.

Among history's leading physicists, Newton is often ranked 1-2 with Albert Einstein. He was a good friend of the astronomer Edmond Halley (one comet is named after him: the Halley's Comet).