In 1696, Newton was named to the job of warden of the Royal Mint, which was responsible for producing England’s currency. Newton ran the Royal Mint and had forgers executed. Newton’s attention was centered on his own research. (Newton was the second person to hold the Lucasian professorship the 17th person, from 1979 to 2009, was physicist and “A Brief History of Time” author Stephen Hawking.) Although he remained at Cambridge for nearly 30 years, Newton showed little interest in teaching or in his students, and his lectures were sparsely attended frequently, no one showed up at all. In 1669, Newton, then 26, was appointed the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, one of the world’s oldest universities, whose origins date to 1209. As a professor at Cambridge, his lectures were poorly attended. Today, the original apple tree continues to grow at Woolsthorpe Manor. The Royal Society, a scientific organization once headed by Newton, loaned the piece of the tree for the voyage, as part of a celebration of the 350th anniversary of the group’s founding. In 2010, a NASA astronaut carried a piece of the ancient apple tree aboard the space shuttle Atlantis for a mission to the International Space Station. Newton later relayed the apple story to William Stukeley, who included it in a book, “Memoir of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life,” published in 1752. While sitting in the garden there one day, he saw an apple fall from a tree, providing him with the inspiration to eventually formulate his law of universal gravitation. In 1665, following an outbreak of the bubonic plague in England, Cambridge University closed its doors, forcing Newton to return home to Woolsthorpe Manor. The Black Death inadvertently set the stage for one of his most famous insights. After finishing his coursework there, Newton left for Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1661, putting farming behind him for good. Eventually, Newton’s mother was persuaded by her son’s former headmaster in Grantham (where, incidentally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was born in 1925) to allow him to return to school. The teen was uninterested in the job and fared poorly at it. However, at age 15 or 16, he was ordered to quit school by his mother (then widowed for a second time) and return to Woolsthorpe Manor to become a farmer. Initially, he wasn’t a strong student however, as the story goes, following a confrontation with a school bully Newton started applying himself in an effort to best the other boy and transformed into a top student. Newton’s mother wanted him to be a farmer.Īt age 12, Newton was enrolled in a school in Grantham, where he boarded at the home of the local apothecary because the daily walk from Woolsthorpe Manor was too long. He even remained silent about some of his scientific and mathematical discoveries for years, if he published them at all. As a teen, he made a list of his past sins and among them was: “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.” As an adult, Newton immersed himself in his work, had no hobbies and never married. The experience of being abandoned by his mother scarred Newton and likely played a role in shaping his solitary, untrusting nature. Newton’s mother went to live with her new husband in another village, leaving behind her young son in the care of his grandparents. When Newton was three, his mother wed a wealthy clergyman, Barnabas Smith, who didn’t want a stepson. Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day 1642 at his family’s home, Woolsthorpe Manor, near the town of Grantham, England, several months after the death of his father, an illiterate farmer. His unhappy childhood helped shape his secretive personality.
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