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Isaac Newton

When Newton arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661, the school was one of England's finest institutes of higher learning. His career as a student lasted until 1665, when he took his degree as a Bachelor of Arts. He was elected a Minor Fellow of the College shortly thereafter, then a Major Fellow and a Master of Arts. In 1669, he was chosen to replace Isaac Barrow--on Barrow's recommendation--as the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, a position that he would hold for thirty-four years. It was a remarkably rapid rise, especially for someone who had arrived in Cambridge from rural obscurity. The contrast between his sudden prominence and his Lincolnshire upbringing seems to have caused Newton some insecurity: for the rest of his life, he would be easily buoyed up by praise from his social betters, and easily distressed by criticism of any kind; further, he would insistently call himself a "gentleman" and trace his lineage back to noble families.


However, even though Newton's self-declared nobility was not legitimate, he certainly deserved his title of professor. Newton's notebooks, preserved for posterity, show that even in his first years as an undergraduate, his later interests were already emerging--a love of mathematics, a keen interest in astronomy and chemistry (joined with an abiding fascination with the pseudosciences of astrology and alchemy), and a curiosity concerning the details of history, ancient and modern, and its relationship with Biblical prophecy. He entered the world of higher education in a time of ferment, at the peak of the Scientific Revolution. The great minds of the 16th and early 17th centuries had prepared the way for this revolution: Nicholas Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei had opened the doors of astronomy and physics, while William Harvey and Andreas Vesalius had begun the mapping of the human body. Now, in Newton's time, great contemporaries (and rivals) like Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley, the...