FREE ESSAY ON NEWTONS LIFE AS WE KNOW IT.

NEWTONS LIFE AS WE KNOW IT.

At his birth on Christmas day, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England, Newton was so
tiny and frail that he was not expected to live. Yet despite his boyhood frailty, he
lived to the age of 85. As a delicate child, he was a loner, interested more in reading,
solving mathematical problems, and mechanical tinkering than in taking part in the usual
boyish activities. 
Until the time Newton entered Cambridge University in 1661, there was little inkling as
to his mental prowess. His shyness kept him from making friends easily, and he did not
mix with his more boisterous fellow students. At the university he took courses in Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, logic, geometry, and trigonometry, and he attended lectures in astronomy,
natural philosophy, and optics. His leisure time was spent reading works by Kepler and by
Descartes, the inventor of analytic geometry, and filling his notebooks with remarks on
the refraction of light, the grinding of lenses, and the extraction of roots of algebraic
equations. 
Newton received his baccalaureate degree--without any great distinction--and then
returned to his home in Woolsthorpe because of the plague that was sweeping Europe. Over
a period of 18 or so months at home, which were probably the most productive years of his
life, Newton discovered the expansion of the general binomial (a+b)n, invented the
fluxions (differential calculus), demonstrated that white light was composed of different
colors of light, discovered the law of gravitation, and laid the foundations of celestial
mechanics. 
In 1668 Newton constructed the world's first reflecting telescope. It had an aperture of
1 inch and a tube length of 6 inches, which led Newton to say of it: This small
instrument, though in itself contemptible may yet be looked upon as the epitome of what
may be done this way. Not satisfied with his first effort, he completed an improved and
somewhat larger reflector with an aperture of nearly 2 inches. 
The publication of his book The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687,
which embodied his mathematical principles and ideas on gravitation and the system of the
world, marked the peak of Newton's creative career. The Principia represents the thought
and study of more than 20 years, and it ranks in importance with Ptolemy's Almagest and
Copernicus's De Revolutionibus. His treatise Opticks appeared in 1704, but most of it was
written many years earlier. 
Many tributes followed Newton's death in 1727. One that stands out was made by the great
French mathematical astronomer Lagrange, who said: Newton was the greatest genius who
ever lived, and the most fortunate; for we cannot find more than once a system of the
world to establish. However, Newton said of himself: If I have seen further than other
men, it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants. In poet Alexander Pope's
Epitaph for Newton are these lines: 
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
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