Isaac Newton was a precocious child, and a local schoolmaster convinced his mother that her son should be well educated. He matriculated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661 and, influenced by the work of Descartes, took an interest in mechanical philosophy.

To enable him to pursue his studies, Newton was awarded a scholarship to remain at Cambridge; this enabled him to develop his theories, and he went on to give new direction to optics, mechanics, and celestial dynamics.Working on mathematics, Newton applied himself to drawing tangents beneath curves (differentiation) and finding areas under curves (integration). He took these 'new analyses' and expanded upon them, eventually finding a method by which to find the area under virtually every algebraic curve then known to mathematicians.

Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which explored how things fell to the earth, also set Newton thinking. And he knew all about Johannes Kepler's work on how planets circle the sun. Newton wondered if he could join the two ideas. Could the same force that kept the moon from being thrown away from the earth apply to gravity at the earth's surface? He made the link, and called his findings the Law of Universal Gravitation. Although his connection between the two was famously said to have been 'occasioned by the fall of an apple' from a tree - in the orchard at his childhood home in Woolsthorpe - the idea did not in fact come to Newton in a flash of inspiration, but was developed over time.

Newton then started experimenting with the 'celebrated phenomenon of colours', and proved that white light is made up of colours mixed together, and the prism merely separated them - he was the first person to understand the rainbow.

In October 1669, Newton became the second Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, but it was his reflecting telescope that finally brought him into full view of the scientific community. It also led to a bitter rivalry with the experimental scientist Robert Hooke, and the Royal Society.

In 1686 he presented his greatest work, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ('Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy') that revealed his laws of motion, and Universal Gravitation. The astronomer Edmund Halley, who thought highly of Newton, paid for its publication. The Principia redirected Newton's intellectual life away from the theology and alchemy that had engaged him in the 1670s, and back to 'real' science.

Newton was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703, despite his previous differences with them, and he held this appointment until his death on 19 March 1727.

Did you know?
Newton was born during the English Civil War.
While Britain was gripped by the horror of the Great Plague of 1665, Newton, sent home from University as protection, made some of his most extraordinary discoveries.
Newton experimented in alchemy.
A man of many roles, Newton was an MP and even became Master of the Royal Mint.
Voltaire attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1727 and went on to champion Isaac Newton as a hero of the European Enlightenment.