Biography Sir Isaac Newton
25 December 1642 – 20 March
Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar, in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (NS 4 January 1643[1]) "an hour or two after midnight",[7] at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. His father, also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before. Born prematurely, Newton was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug.[8] When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19: "Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them."[9] Newton's mother had three children from her second marriage.[10]
From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School, Grantham, which taught Latin and Greek and probably imparted a significant foundation of mathematics.[11] He was removed from school, and by October 1659, he was to be found at Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, where his mother, widowed for a second time, attempted to make a farmer of him. Newton hated farming.[12] Henry Stokes, master at the King's School, persuaded his mother to send him back to school so that he might complete his education. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student,[13] distinguishing himself mainly by building sundials and models of windmills.
Developing a theory of calculus. Unfortunately, at the same time as Newton, calculus was being developed by Leibinz. When Leibinz published his results, there was a bitter feud between the two men, with Newton claiming plagiarism. This bitter feud lasted until Leibinz death in 1713, it also extended between British mathematicians and the continent.
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