part0008

I n 1661, Newton would find himself in Trinity College in Cambridge after excelling at his grammar school. He would still find himself in the world of mathematics, but his education would soon take a different path. Due to the delay in him getting to university, due to looking after his mother’s land, Newton was slightly older than most of the undergraduates in the college.

At the time Newton set foot in Cambridge, there was already a revolution going on in the world of science. The likes of Copernicus and Kepler had already proven that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and Galileo had laid the groundwork for understanding the laws of inertia. He was in an age where the world was discovering that we weren’t the center of the universe. This though wasn’t an easy process, and the likes of Cambridge were late in accepting this line of thinking as they still got most of their funding from the church.

This line of thinking had come from Aristotle, and that’s who Newton studied for much of his early years there. Whilst Aristotle was a great mind himself, his views on the universe were outdated as technology moved on from a man who had died in 322. While Newton took onboard a lot of his work, it was time to move on with some of these beliefs, but institutions like Cambridge were reluctant to do so.

It was only when Newton furthered his reading that he began to understand other ways of thinking. He read works by the likes of Rene Descartes along with other philosophers who disagreed with Aristotle’s view of the world. These were people who proposed that the world was made out of particles in motion and that nature was simply a result of their mechanical interaction.

It was at this stage that Newton would search for the truth and start a notebook with a slogan that read

which is a very scientific approach where everything is questioned until it’s proved. It set the basis for a life where Newton would have his ideas and then find a way to prove them.

These notes that he left showed that his thinking was changing to that of the new world and was gaining all this knowledge from every source that he could find to develop his own view on how the world worked. It was at this stage where we see Newton believing in a world of particles, but also around this time, Newton’s fascination with magic and alchemy would begin. This was all recorded in his notebook, which he entitled “Certain Philosophical Questions ,” which detailed the books Newton read and the ideas that he would have at the time.

What wasn’t recorded in his notebook was that it was during his period that his fascination with mathematical studies would begin. Again, he would turn to a book written by Descartes called La Geometrie where he would start to learn the basics of algebra and geometry before he would advance his reading. At this stage, Newton must have known that it all came naturally to him as he was reading difficult work with ease.

It only took Newton about a year to become a master of the subject and had even started to look into his own line of critical mathematical thinking. It was at this stage that he would invent the basics of what would become calculus as well as binomial theorem where he would begin to work out how to calculate space, curvature, and everything between it.

In 1665, the university had to be closed down due to the plague. Newton had only just received his bachelor’s degree and without any normal training and gained his knowledge mostly from his books. Newton had become one of the greatest minds in the world, but he kept it to himself with his notebook. From here, we can see that Newton, in the two years that the university was closed, was working on his ideas. He took his ideas of circular motion and started applying them to the moon and the planets. He would lay the foundations for his own work on gravitation, but for now, he had kept all of these findings to himself.

By 1669, Newton was already writing about his findings in a manuscript entitled “On Analysis by Infinite Series ,” which began to get him known within the mathematical community. This was the start of a point where we see Newton’s reluctance to release his work to a broader scale, and a small number of his peers only knew his findings. At this stage, even though not a lot of people knew it, Newton was already one of the greatest mathematicians in the world.

Upon his return to Cambridge after the plague, he was elected as a fellowship in Trinity College. At this time, Newton’s studies were wide-ranging, and he was developing his understanding of optics, mathematics, and chemistry. Also, Newton wrote a paper on fluxion and other branches of mathematics and handed into his professor Isaac Barrow. Barrow, with Newton’s permission, shared it with an esteemed colleague John Collins.

Collins admired the paper, and it led Barrow to call Newton an “unparalleled genius ,” which just goes to show how highly regarded Newton was, and this isn’t even listed with his most exceptional achievements.

In Cambridge, the role of ‘Lucasian Professor of Mathematics ’ was held by Barrow at that time who had previously taken Newton’s works to London. Barrow stepped down from his role and recommended that Newton should succeed him though.

The role meant that Newton didn’t have to tutor, but he was asked to deliver a series of lectures, and he chose his work in optics to provide the basis for his first lectures. This allowed him to develop an essay that he had written called “Of Colours ” into a full book, which would be his first of his “Opticks ” series. The lectures were hardly attended, but it still allowed Newton to develop some of his most important work.