Newton's Solitary Genius

"Presiding Genius" by Peter Richards, in CAM (Michaelmas Term, 1995), Univ. of Cambridge Development Office, 10 Trumpington St., Cambridge, England CB2 1QA.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the great-Cambridge. But he "was too much his own est mathematician who ever lived, spent 35 man for Trinity to recognize his genius years at Trinity College, University of straightaway," writes Richards, editor of CAM, the university’s alumni magazine.

Newton’s solitary nature was at least partly a result of his personal history. His father, a yeoman farmer, died before Newton was born. When the boy was three, his mother married a wealthy clergyman, leaving her son in the care of his grandmother. Newton endured "eight years of apparently loveless isolation," Richards notes, until his hated stepfather died and he went off to Grantham Free School.

Remembered later as "a sober, silent, thinking lad," Newton at Grantham was forever experimenting, Richards says, building wooden clocks driven by weights and other devices. Returning home at 17, Newton kept on experimenting, to his mother’s dismay. "He was so surly that after nine months his mother finally gave up. Newton was packed off to Cambridge," with even the servants saying he was fit for nothing else.

Because his wealthy but barely literate mother refused to pay, Newton entered Cambridge in 1661 as a poor "subsizar," who earned his way by waiting on the Fellows and better-off students, until 1664, when he was elected to a scholarship.

Two years after entering Cambridge, Newton came upon René Descartes’s Geometry (1637). "Thereafter," Richards says, "he immersed himself, learning ‘of his owne inclination, and by his owne industry without a teacher.’ " He received his bachelor’s degree in January 1665 and threw himself into research. By the end of the next year, he had invented calculus, discovered that light was "a confused aggregate of Rays" which exhibit different colors, and, after noticing an apple fall to the ground at the family farm, begun to conceptualize his theory of universal gravitation.

Yet Newton’s astounding discoveries remained known only to him for some years to come. Indeed, although he stayed on at Trinity as a mathematics professor, it was more than two decades before Cambridge and the world came to appreciate how great a genius was in their midst. That occurred with the publication of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), in which he detailed his theory of universal gravitation and his laws of motion.

Suddenly, the reclusive bachelor, now in his mid-forties, was the toast of Cambridge and London, and he seemed to enjoy it. He left the university for a government sinecure in London in 1696, and became the first scientist ever knighted. At his funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1727, Voltaire recalled Newton’s reply when asked how he discovered the law of universal gravitation: "By thinking on it continually."