The plague student
Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day 1642 (by England’s old calendar) at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, a posthumous child later abandoned to grandparents by a remarrying mother — biographers reach for that wound to explain much. Cambridge took him in 1661; the Great Plague sent him home in 1665-66, and in those farmhouse months — his annus mirabilis — he laid the foundations of calculus, split sunlight with a prism, and began thinking about gravity. The apple is genuine tradition (he told the story himself in old age; the tree at Woolsthorpe still stands) minus the head-bonk: watching an apple fall, he asked whether the same pull reached the Moon.
The Principia
Prodded and financed by Edmond Halley, Newton delivered in 1687 the Principia Mathematica: three laws of motion and universal gravitation — one inverse-square force governing the fall of apples, the tides, the Moon, and the planets — derived with geometric rigour from phenomena. It is the founding document of mathematical physics; nothing on its scale had existed before, and its mechanics ran the sciences until Einstein adjusted the edges. His Opticks (1704) added the experimental style: white light decomposed and recomposed, and the reflecting telescope — built with his own hands — that had first announced him to the Royal Society, over which he later presided for a quarter-century like an absolute monarch.
The monarch had feuds. Against Leibniz, who invented calculus independently and published first, Newton waged a priority war of anonymous reviews and a rigged Royal Society inquiry (he wrote its “impartial” report himself); against Hooke, he was still settling scores after the man died. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” reads sweetly out of context; it appears in a letter to the short, stooped Hooke.
The other Newton
The economist Keynes, buying Newton’s papers in 1936, found “the last of the magicians”: perhaps a million words on alchemy, and heretical theology (he denied the Trinity, a secret that would have cost him everything) pursued with the same ferocity as the physics — for Newton one project, reading God’s two books. His last three decades were spent in London power: as Master of the Mint he ran the great recoinage and personally investigated counterfeiters — capital crime — sending several, most famously the coiner William Chaloner, to the gallows. He died in 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey under a monument Voltaire marvelled at: a philosopher interred like a king.