After finishing his coursework there, Newton left for Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1661, putting farming behind him for good. Eventually, Newton’s mother was persuaded by her son’s former headmaster in Grantham (where, incidentally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was born in 1925) to allow him to return to school. The teen was uninterested in the job and fared poorly at it. However, at age 15 or 16, he was ordered to quit school by his mother (then widowed for a second time) and return to Woolsthorpe Manor to become a farmer. Initially, he wasn’t a strong student however, as the story goes, following a confrontation with a school bully Newton started applying himself in an effort to best the other boy and transformed into a top student. Newton’s mother wanted him to be a farmer.Īt age 12, Newton was enrolled in a school in Grantham, where he boarded at the home of the local apothecary because the daily walk from Woolsthorpe Manor was too long. He even remained silent about some of his scientific and mathematical discoveries for years, if he published them at all. As a teen, he made a list of his past sins and among them was: “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.” As an adult, Newton immersed himself in his work, had no hobbies and never married. The experience of being abandoned by his mother scarred Newton and likely played a role in shaping his solitary, untrusting nature. Newton’s mother went to live with her new husband in another village, leaving behind her young son in the care of his grandparents. When Newton was three, his mother wed a wealthy clergyman, Barnabas Smith, who didn’t want a stepson. Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day 1642 at his family’s home, Woolsthorpe Manor, near the town of Grantham, England, several months after the death of his father, an illiterate farmer. His unhappy childhood helped shape his secretive personality.
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