Newton’s role in the history of Mathematics*

Abstract

Isaac Newton, who was born on Christmas Day 1642 and died in 1727, was a self-taught mathematician who did not display any outstanding mathematical ability until towards the end of his under graduate days. In his youth in Lincolnshire he showed great interest in mechanical contrivances and he liked making sundials. Even in his schooldays he appears to have been a loner, but he once thrashed another boy who had provoked him. In 1659, when he was nearly 17, his mother (his father having died before he was born) withdrew him from King’s School, Grantham, which he had attended for several years. She intended to make him farm the family estate at Woolsthorpe, but he was completely uninterested in farming. Eventually, in June 1661, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a ‘subsizar’, a lowly form of undergraduate who performed certain menial tasks (the corresponding Oxford term was ‘servitor’). Since Newton came from the gentry, this experience must have been humiliating and may well have reinforced his natural propensity to isolation.