( Taken from ‘Maths for the 80′s” by Priddle & Davies, pp 406 – 407)

Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night;
God said, Let Newton be! And all was light!
POPE, Epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton is conservatively ranked with Archimedes and Gauss as one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time – and many believe he is the greatest of the three.

Born in Woolsthorpe, England on Christmas Day, 1642, Newton did not show any great potential in his early schooling, being among the lowest in his class. At 14 he left school to help out on his mother’s farm, but there he spent much of his time reading books on mathematics and making models, one being a mouse-operated mill for grinding wheat into flour.

It was when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge that his genius was recognised. Because of his poor grounding at school, he had to discover and prove most of the mathematics he used.
Nevertheless, by the age of 23, Newton had made four important discoveries, any one of which would have made him famous.

He analysed the nature of light, showing that white light is composed of a number of basic colours. He developed the law of universal gravitation, this is heavily mathematical and can be regarded as Applied Mathematics. In the field of Pure Mathematics, Newton is remembered for the Binomial Theorem, and the invention of Calculus, a completely new and powerful field of mathematics.

In the later part of his life, Newton was appointed Master of the Mint and spent most of his spare time in theological pursuits. His great power of concentration, however, did not diminish. On a number of occasions, after an exhausting day’s work at the mint, he was presented with a problem which had baffled the leading mathematicians on the Continent for months. In a couple of hours, the problem would be solved.

This interesting English genius was so great he was buried in Westminster Abbey, and yet so humble that he once said:”‘if I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”.

(Newton stands with other famous people such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Auguste Rodin, Friedrich Ntetzsche, Giacomo Puccini, Marcel Proust and Paul McCartney as just a few of the many people who have not done well at school but who have succeeded in the real world.)