In the previous episode of this series, I took a look at the two English mathematicians, who most influenced the young Isaac Newton (1642–1726 os) in the early stages of his intellectual development, Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) and John Wallis ((1616–1703). Today we take a first of, probably, several looks at Isaac Newton, who played a highly significant role in the evolution of physics, although it still wasn’t called that yet, when he combined terrestrial mechanics with astronomy und the umbrella of universal gravity in his magnum opus, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) 1687.
The popular hyperbole calls Newton the greatest scientist of all time, which is of course rubbish. Apart from the fact that the use of the term scientist, first coined by William Whewell in 1831, is anachronistic it pays to pause and note that even as late as the end of the seventeenth century there was no such thing as a professional scientist in the modern sense and certainly no preprogrammed career path to become one. If we consider the period from the gradual revival of science in the High Middle Ages to the period of Newton the closest we get to professional scientists are the court astrologers, who were mostly also the astronomers. Even Kepler, who revolutionised astronomy and optics, earned his living mostly as a professional astrologer.
The medieval university didn’t really take mathematics seriously and there was almost never chairs for mathematics. They were predominantly Aristotelian and what are now the physical sciences were handled philosophically not mathematically. When chairs for mathematics began to be created during the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, first in Krakau and then in the Renaissance universities of northern Italy, there were actually created to teach astrology to medicine students because of the prevailing mainstream astromedicine, or iatromathematics to give it its correct name. To do astrology you need to be able to do astronomy and to do astronomy you need to be able to do mathematics. Even at the beginning of the seventeenth century Galileo, as professor of mathematics in Padua, would have been required to teach astrology to the medical students, although we don’t have a direct record of his having done so.
Chairs for mathematics and or astronomy gradually spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century but Britain lagged well behind the continental developments. In England, Henry Savile (1529–1622), who travelled abroad to acquire his own mathematical education, established chairs for geometry and astronomy at Oxford University in 1619. Cambridge had to wait until 1663 before Henry Lucas (c. 1610–1663) bequeathed the funding for a professorship in his will, with Charles II establishing the Lucasian Chair in 1664. Newton was the second Lucasian Professor following in the footsteps of Isaac Barrow. Of course, the Gresham chairs for geometry and astronomy, set up at the beginning of the century, predate both of the university chairs but these were not teaching positions but public lectureships aimed at a general public. Henry Briggs (1561–1630) was both the first Gresham and the first Savilian professor for geometry.
To show that there no such thing as a science career path in the seventeenth century let us briefly recapitulate the life paths of four scholars who have featured in this series. who made serious contributions to the emerging mathematical sciences.
René Descartes (1596–1650) was the son of a minor aristocrat and politician. He was schooled in the Jesuit College of La Flèche meaning he received a first class education including probably the best mathematical education available in Europe at the time. He studied two years at the University of Poitiers graduating with a Baccalaureate and Licence in canon and civil law. However, instead of now becoming a lawyer he set off to become a military engineer but to do that he, a Catholic French aristocrat, went off to Breda in the Netherlands to join the Protestant Dutch States Army. Purely by chance in Breda, he met the Dutch candle maker turned school teacher Isaac Beeckman, who introduced him to both the corpuscular mechanical theory and mathematical physics. This set him off on a winding path to becoming a mathematician, philosopher and physicist.
Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) was the son of a powerful aristocratic diplomat who enjoyed an absolutely first class private education before going to Leiden University to study law and mathematics followed by a period at the Orange College in Breda. He had been prepared his whole life to become a diplomat like his father but after one mission he decided the life was not for him he withdrew to the family home and supported by his father became a private scholar studying a wide spectrum of the mathematical sciences. Later he would be become a paid scholar in the new French Académie des sciences. That the Académie employed paid scholars was an advantage over the rival Royal society in London, which only paid Robert Hooke as curator of experiments.
As we saw John Wallis (1616–1703) had perhaps the weirdest life path for a scientist. The son of a cleric he also became a cleric occupying various church positions. Purely by chance he discovered a talent for cryptography and became the cryptologist of the parliamentary party during the Civil War and Interregnum. In 1649, Cromwell appointed him, a man with no formal education in mathematics, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, a post he held for fifty years going on to become one of Europe’s leading mathematical authorities having spent his first couple of years in the post teaching himself the full spectrum of mathematics.
Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) the son of a draper born into a family of many prominent scholars and theologians. A graduate and fellow of Trinity College Cambridge he taught himself mathematics and the natural sciences with a small group of like-minded fellows. Leaving England in 1655 because of the rise of puritanism he travelled extensively through Europe and Asia Minor for four year, deepening his impressive linguistic abilities. Returning in 1659 he was appointed both Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and three years later Gresham professor of geometry. In 1663, he was appointed the first Lucasian Professor, resigning the Regius and Gresham professorships in 1664. In 1669, he resigned the Lucasian chair in order to devote his time to theology.
Although their life paths differ substantially, all four of our mathematical scholars have in common that they come from the upper, educated, well off strata of society, two of them were even aristocrats, and could afford the so-to-speak luxury of pursuing a career in still not really established mathematical disciplines. This, as we will see, was not true for Isaac Newton.
Born in manor house of the hamlet of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth near Grantham in Lincolnshire on Christmas Day 1642, on the Julian calendar, Isaac was the son of the yeoman farmer Isaac Newton and his wife Hannah Ayscough. Isaac senior was not only uneducated but could not even sign his own name. He was however not poor and was a successful, prosperous farmer, who unfortunately died three months before his son’s birth.
His mother Hannah, however, came from higher social strata than her husband, from a family that valued education, her brother the Rev William Ayscough MA was a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge.
When Isaac was just three years old, Hannah married the Rev. Barnabus Smith and went to live with him in his parish of North Witham a mile and a half away, leaving Isaac in Woolsthorpe Manor in the care of his maternal grandmother. Eight years later Barnabus died and Hannah returned to Woolsthorpe with Isaac’s three step siblings. Two year later, Isaac, now twelve, was sent off to the grammar school in Grantham, where he lodged with the local apothecary, Mr Clark. Isaac lived an isolated life at school and tended to neglect his studies, which basically consisted just of Latin, but always did just enough to remain school primus.
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At the age of sixteen Hannah removed him from the school and by 1659 he was living back in Woolsthorpe, where Hannah tried to make a farmer out of him. This proved to be a dismal failure and the school master Henry Stokes and his uncle William Asycough persuaded Hannah to let him finish his education and go to university. Stokes even remitted his school fees to convince the reluctant widow.
He graduated school primus and in June 1661 he was admitted to Trinity College Cambridge as a subsizar, this is a student whose fees are partially remitted in return for which he works as a servant for other students. Hannah Ayscough Newton Smith was a very wealthy woman so, why did she force her son to earn his way through college? She also only gave him an allowance of £10 pa. The major theory is that this was her revenge for being pressured into letting him go to university at all but I think there was an element of puritanism, he should not expect to be spoon fed but should learn the value of money.
It would seem logical to assume that Isaac went up to Trinity because it had been the college of his maternal uncle, William Ayscough, who had pressured Hannah into sending him to university but there is a second possible source of influence in this issue. There is slight evidence that Isaac served as subsizar to the Trinity fellow, Rev. Humphrey Babington, rector of Boothby Pagnell and brother of Katherine Babington, a friend of Hannah’s and the wife of William Clark the Grantham apothecary where Newton boarded as a schoolboy. Later, Newton stayed with Babington for a time during the summer in 1666-67. It is possible that that the Rev. Babington had recognised Newton’s abilities and taken him under his wing in 1661.
The undergraduate curriculum in Cambridge in the 1660s was little changed from that when the university was founded more than four centuries earlier. This meant Aristotle, Aristotle and more Aristotle, a diet that didn’t appeal to the young Isaac, who remained a mediocre student. Newton was a disciplined note taker all of his life and we know from his own records that he didn’t actually finish any of his set books. By the 1660s standards had fallen so low in Trinity that basically any student who stayed the course for four years could graduate. So, despite his lack of engagement Isaac duly graduated BA in 1664.
The next step was to apply for a scholarship, which would enable him to continue his studies, and this is where his lack of effort almost caused him to stumble. There were a limited number of scholarship and a larger number of excellent potential candidates and it seemed that the lacklustre Isaac was not in the running. However, somebody in the background pulled some strings and he was granted a scholarship on 28 April 1664, enabling him to study for another four years for his MA and making him financially independent for the first time in his life. It is not clear who did the string pulling. It might possibly have been Isaac Barrow who had examined Newton on Euclid for his scholarship and found him wanting or more possibly the Rev Babington, now a highly influential figure in Trinity. In 1667, Babington became one of the eight senior fellow, the group that controlled the college.
What now followed in the years from 1664 up to 1672, when Newton published his first paper, is one of the most impressive period of self-study ever undertaken, including the mythical Annus mirabilis, the year that Newton spent at home in Woolsthorpe Manor having been sent down from Cambridge because of the plague in 1665-66. During this period Newton taught himself the modern mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, and optics utilising the work of the leading scholars in these fields, extending and going beyond them and creating his first contribution to these fields. I’ve written a long blog post outlining all that he did over the second half of the 1660s and am not going to repeat it here. When he entered the 1670s Isaac stood at the beginning of the process that would see him become the most powerful natural philosopher in Europe.
The Renaissance Mathematicus 