Who Was Isaac Newton?

1. A lonely childhood in Lincolnshire

Isaac Newton was born on 25 December 1642 by the Julian calendar then in use in England, which corresponds to 4 January 1643 in the modern Gregorian calendar, at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. His father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before his son was born. Newton was born prematurely and was so small that his mother said he could have fitted into a quart pot. When he was three, his mother remarried and left him in the care of his grandmother, a separation that biographers believe left lasting marks on his character. He later wrote of his resentment, and he remained a solitary and emotionally guarded person for the rest of his life.

He was educated at the King's School in Grantham, where he lodged with a local apothecary and showed an early talent for making mechanical models, including a working windmill, a water clock and a sundial. His mother, widowed for a second time, tried to make him into a farmer, but he was so bad at farming and so absorbed in his books that his uncle persuaded her to send him back to school and then to university. In 1661 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a sizar, a student who paid reduced fees by performing menial tasks for wealthier students. He studied the standard curriculum of the time, but he also read widely on his own, working through the works of Descartes, Galileo and Kepler.

Cambridge was closed in 1665 because of the plague, and Newton returned to Woolsthorpe for nearly two years. These years, later called his miraculous years, were among the most productive in the history of science. In the quiet of the Lincolnshire countryside, away from university routine, he worked out the foundations of calculus, discovered the composition of white light, and began to think about the force that holds the Moon in its orbit. He later told a story, which may be partly legend, of watching an apple fall in the garden at Woolsthorpe and wondering whether the same force that pulled the apple to the ground also reached as far as the Moon.

2. Light, colour and the reflecting telescope

Newton's first great published discovery concerned light. In the 1660s the common view was that white light was pure and that colours were created when light was modified by passing through a medium such as glass. Newton showed, with a series of careful experiments using prisms, that white light is actually a mixture of all the colours of the spectrum, and that a prism separates them because each colour is bent by a different amount. He demonstrated this decisively in his experimentum crucis of 1666, in which he passed a narrow beam of sunlight through one prism and then recombined the colours with a second prism to make white light again. The result was one of the most elegant experiments ever performed, and it founded the modern science of optics.

His work on light also led to a practical invention. Telescopes of the time used lenses, and they suffered from chromatic aberration, a blurring caused by the different colours being brought to focus at different points. Newton concluded that the fault was in the lens itself, and in 1668 he built a telescope that used a curved mirror instead of a lens to gather light. The reflecting telescope was small, only about fifteen centimetres long, but it worked, and it became the design on which all large modern telescopes are based. When the Royal Society in London saw it, Newton was elected a fellow in 1672, and he published his first scientific paper, on light and colour, in the Society's journal.

Newton's ideas about light were controversial. His claim that light was made of particles, or corpuscles, put him at odds with the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, who argued that light was a wave. Newton also quarrelled with the English natural philosopher Robert Hooke, who claimed to have had the idea of the spectrum first. The disputes were bitter and personal, and they made Newton reluctant to publish. His book Opticks, in which he set out his full theory of light and colour, did not appear until 1704, after Hooke was dead, nearly forty years after the experiments on which it was based.

3. The Principia and the laws of the universe

Newton's masterpiece, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, usually called the Principia, was published in 1687. It was written at the urging of the astronomer Edmond Halley, who had asked Newton about the shape of planetary orbits and was astonished to be told that Newton had already solved the problem. Halley persuaded him to write up his results, and then paid for the printing himself. The book is written in Latin and in a difficult geometrical style, and few people could read it when it first appeared. But its conclusions changed science for ever. In it Newton stated his three laws of motion: that a body remains at rest or in uniform motion unless acted on by a force; that force equals mass times acceleration; and that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The Principia also contained the law of universal gravitation: that every mass in the universe attracts every other mass with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. With this single law, Newton explained both why objects fall to the Earth and why the planets move around the Sun in elliptical orbits, as Kepler had observed. He showed that the Moon is held in its orbit by the same gravity that pulls an apple to the ground, and he explained the tides as the result of the gravitational pull of the Moon and the Sun on the Earth's oceans. It was the first time anyone had shown that the heavens and the Earth obeyed the same physical laws, and it destroyed the old idea that the celestial world was governed by different rules from the earthly one.

The Principia also contained the first accurate treatment of the motion of comets, the calculation of the mass of the Earth and the Sun, and an explanation of the shape of the Earth, which Newton showed must be slightly flattened at the poles because of its rotation. His work was not complete: he could not explain what gravity was, only how it acted, and he described it as acting at a distance, which troubled him and his critics alike. But the predictive power of his system was overwhelming, and within a generation it had become the accepted account of the physical world, used by astronomers, navigators and engineers across Europe.

4. Calculus and the dispute with Leibniz

Newton developed the mathematical method he called fluxions, which we now know as calculus, during his plague years at Woolsthorpe in 1665 and 1666. Calculus is the mathematics of change: it allows the calculation of rates of change and of areas under curves, and it is essential to almost all modern science and engineering. Newton used it privately in his work on planetary motion, but he did not publish it, and for many years only a few friends knew of it. Meanwhile, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed his own version of calculus independently in the 1670s and published it in 1684, with a notation of differentials and integrals that was far clearer than Newton's and that is still used today.

The question of who deserved the credit became one of the most bitter disputes in the history of science. Newton's supporters accused Leibniz of copying his work, and Leibniz's supporters accused Newton of claiming credit for what Leibniz had done. The dispute was made worse by national pride: English mathematicians rallied behind Newton, and continental mathematicians behind Leibniz. In 1712 the Royal Society, of which Newton was then president, appointed a committee to judge the matter, and the committee's report, written largely by Newton himself although published anonymously, found in Newton's favour. Modern scholarship takes a more balanced view. Historians generally agree that Newton developed his method first, in the mid-1660s, and that Leibniz developed his independently and published first, and that both deserve credit for one of the great intellectual achievements of the age.

The dispute had lasting consequences. English mathematicians, loyal to Newton's notation, fell behind their continental counterparts for a century, because Leibniz's notation was easier to use and better suited to the development of calculus. Newton himself was deeply wounded by the affair, and it deepened his suspicion of other scholars and his reluctance to share his work. He kept many of his results private for years, and he published only when he felt he had to, a habit that slowed the spread of his ideas and that historians still find frustrating. The calculus dispute remains the classic example of how priority, pride and national feeling can distort even the greatest science.

5. The Mint, the presidency and the hidden Newton

In 1696 Newton left Cambridge to become Warden of the Royal Mint in London, and in 1699 he became its Master, a post he held until his death. The appointment was partly a reward for his scientific reputation, but he took it seriously. Britain's coinage was in a terrible state, with clipped and counterfeit coins in wide circulation, and Newton oversaw the great recoinage of the 1690s, in which the old hammered coins were withdrawn and replaced with milled coins that were harder to forge. He also pursued counterfeiters with remarkable energy, gathering evidence, cross-examining suspects and attending trials. At least one counterfeiter was executed on evidence Newton had collected. It was a very different life from the quiet scholar of Cambridge, and it showed a side of Newton that many of his admirers found surprising: the ruthless administrator.

In 1703 Newton was elected president of the Royal Society, a position he held for the remaining twenty-four years of his life. He used the presidency to promote his own views and to settle old scores, most notably with Hooke and with the astronomer John Flamsteed, whose star catalogue he published without permission. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705, the first scientist to be knighted for his scientific work. He became a national figure, and his portrait was painted and engraved more often than that of almost any other Englishman of his time.

Behind the public figure was a private Newton that his contemporaries barely knew. After his death, his papers revealed that he had spent far more time on alchemy and on the study of biblical prophecy than on physics. He believed that the ancient texts contained hidden knowledge, and he spent years trying to decode the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation to calculate the date of the end of the world. He also held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, which he kept secret because it could have cost him his position at Cambridge. Historians now see this hidden Newton not as an embarrassment but as part of the same mind: a man who believed that nature and scripture were both coded messages from God, waiting to be deciphered.

6. Character, quarrels and loneliness

Newton was a difficult man. He was intensely private, slow to trust, and quick to take offence. He had few close friends, and his friendships often ended in quarrels. He never married, and he lived for most of his life alone, first in college rooms at Cambridge and later in a house in London, cared for by his niece Catherine Barton. He was capable of great generosity, supporting young scholars and giving money to relatives, but he was also capable of sustained vindictiveness, pursuing his enemies for years after the original offence. His quarrels with Hooke, Flamsteed and Leibniz were not brief outbursts but long campaigns, and they did real damage to the people involved and to the science of the time.

He was also a man of deep anxiety. He suffered at least one serious breakdown in 1693, during which he wrote strange and accusing letters to friends, and historians have debated ever since whether the episode was caused by overwork, by mercury poisoning from his alchemical experiments, or by a crisis of faith. He was afraid of being accused of heresy for his religious views, and he was afraid of being scooped by rivals, and these fears made him secretive about his work. He often withheld results for years, and he sometimes published only fragments, leaving his readers to guess at the rest. It is one of the paradoxes of his life that the man who gave the world its most open and public system of natural law was himself so private and guarded.

Yet those who knew him well also describe a man of intense focus and extraordinary intellectual power, who could work for days without sleep when a problem gripped him, and who forgot to eat while he was thinking. His housekeeper said that she often found him sitting by an untasted meal, lost in thought. He was not a warm man, but he was a serious one, and he believed that his work mattered because it revealed the order God had built into the world. He once wrote that if he had seen further than others, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants, a rare moment of humility from a man who usually guarded his reputation fiercely.

7. Legacy: the world after Newton

Newton died in London on 31 March 1727, aged eighty-four, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first scientist to be given that honour. His funeral was attended by the leading figures of English public life, and his monument in the Abbey shows him reclining on a pile of his own books, with the planets and the zodiac above him. For more than two centuries after his death, his system dominated science. Astronomers used his laws to predict the return of Halley's comet and to discover the planet Neptune from its gravitational effects on Uranus. Engineers used his laws to build bridges, ships and machines. The Principia became the model of what a scientific theory should be: a small number of laws, stated mathematically, from which a vast range of phenomena could be predicted.

His influence went beyond physics. The Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century took Newton's success as proof that human reason could discover the laws of nature, and they tried to apply the same method to politics, economics and society. The French philosopher Voltaire helped to spread Newton's ideas across Europe, and the idea of a universe governed by rational laws became central to modern thought. At the same time, Newton's own belief that the universe required a divine designer, and his work on prophecy and alchemy, were quietly set aside by later generations, who preferred the image of Newton as a pure rationalist. The real Newton was more complicated than that image, and modern scholarship has restored the full picture.

Newton's laws were eventually shown to have limits. In the early twentieth century, Einstein's theory of relativity showed that they break down at speeds close to that of light and in very strong gravitational fields, and quantum mechanics showed that they do not describe the behaviour of very small particles. But within the world of ordinary speeds and sizes, the world of bridges, aeroplanes and spacecraft, Newton's laws remain the working tools of science and engineering. Every satellite in orbit, every rocket that leaves the Earth, and every bridge that carries traffic was designed using Newton's mathematics. He remains, in the judgement of most historians of science, the single most important figure in the history of physics, and the author of the most successful scientific system ever devised.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Isaac Newton
• Wikipedia — Isaac Newton
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Newton

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• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.