Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642 in Woolsthorpe, a small village in Linconshire, England. Isaac's father had passed away two months prior to him being born, and three years later, Isaac's mother married a 63 year old man and left him behind to live with his grandparents (stanford). Isaac's grandmother had taught him how to read and write unlike Isaac's father whom was illiterate (stanford). After failing to manage his families farm, Isaac decided to attend Trinity College in 1661 (stanford). By 1664, Newton had begun reaching beyond the standard curriculum, reading, for example, the 1656 Latin edition of Descartes's Opera philosophica, which included the Meditations, Discourse on Method, the Dioptrics, and the Principles of Philosophy (stanford). By early 1664 he had also begun teaching himself mathematics, taking notes on works by Oughtred, Viète, Wallis, and Descartes (stanford).
Newton spent all but three months from the summer of 1665 until the spring of 1667 at home in Woolsthorpe when the university was closed because of the plague (stanford). This period was his so-called annus mirabilis (stanford). During it, he made his initial experimental discoveries in optics and developed (independently of Huygens's treatment of 1659) the mathematical theory of uniform circular motion, in the process noting the relationship between the inverse-square and Kepler's rule relating the square of the planetary periods to the cube of their mean distance from the Sun (stanford). Even more impressively, by late 1666 he had become de facto the leading mathematician in the world, having extended his earlier examination of cutting-edge problems into the discovery of the calculus, as presented in his tract of October 1666 (stanford).
The enormous range of subjects to which Newton devoted his full concentration at one time or another during the 60 years of his intellectual career — mathematics, optics, mechanics, astronomy, experimental chemistry, alchemy, and...
