60 Fun Facts About Isaac Newton

In which year was Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica first published?

The book laid out the laws of motion and universal gravitation and is often called the most important single work in the physical sciences.

Newton shares credit for inventing calculus with which German mathematician?

Both men developed it independently, but it is the German's notation that mathematicians still use, adopted by British mathematicians only after 1820.

Newton was born at a manor house in which English county?

Woolsthorpe Manor, his birthplace, is now a Grade I listed building cared for by the National Trust.

According to the Julian calendar then used in England, Newton was born on which holiday in 1642?

By the modern Gregorian calendar the date works out to 4 January 1643, which is why sources disagree about the year.

Newton was born prematurely. His mother said the newborn could have fit inside what?

His father, also called Isaac, had died three months earlier, so the tiny baby was born into a house already in mourning.

Newton's widowed mother pulled him out of school at about seventeen to make him take up what?

He hated it, and his old headmaster and his uncle talked her into sending him back to school and then on to Cambridge.

As a schoolboy in Grantham, Newton distinguished himself mainly by building what?

The turnaround reportedly followed a fight with a schoolyard bully; having beaten him, Newton set out to beat him academically as well.

Which Cambridge college admitted Newton in June 1661?

A descendant of his famous apple tree now grows outside the college's main gate, below the room he lived in as a student.

Newton entered Cambridge as a 'subsizar', which meant he paid his way by doing what?

The arrangement lasted until a scholarship in 1664 covered his costs through to his MA.

Why did Cambridge University close in 1665, sending Newton home for his 'golden years' of discovery?

The next two years at Woolsthorpe produced the foundations of calculus, his optics and the law of gravitation.

How old was Newton when he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge?

He was only the second holder of the chair, and by most accounts a hopeless lecturer whose classes were usually empty.

Whom did Newton succeed as Lucasian Professor in 1669?

His predecessor had already forwarded Newton's early calculus paper to John Collins as the work of 'an extraordinary genius'.

According to his assistant Humphrey Newton, what did Newton do when nobody turned up to his lectures?

He would halve the lecture from 30 minutes to 15, fulfil his contract, and go back to his experiments; in his whole career he tutored only three students.

Newton built the first working reflecting telescope to sidestep which flaw of lens telescopes?

His prism experiments convinced him that any lens would split light into colours, so he replaced the objective lens with a mirror.

Roughly how long was the first reflecting telescope Newton produced in late 1668?

Small as it was, it gave a clearer and larger image than much longer refractors and earned him an invitation to demonstrate it to the Royal Society.

Newton reported that his new reflecting telescope showed him the crescent phase of which planet?

He also picked out the four Galilean moons of Jupiter with the same eight-inch instrument.

Newton ground the mirrors for his telescopes from a custom composition of what?

He judged the quality of the finished optics using the interference rings that now bear his name.

What name did Newton give to the multicoloured band of light that emerges from a prism?

He then showed the band could be recombined into white light with a lens and a second prism, proving colour is intrinsic to light.

In which year did Newton publish Opticks, his book on light and colour?

It ended with a set of 'queries', open questions in which he speculated that light and matter might be convertible into one another.

In Opticks, Newton argued that light is fundamentally composed of what?

He still noted wave-like behaviour in thin films, and his mechanical model even anticipated the Goos-Hanchen effect.

The burning mirror Newton presented to the Royal Society in 1704 was made up of how many concave mirrors?

Each was about a foot across; the assembly reportedly boiled gold and may have been the most intense man-made radiation before 1945.

Newton's early electrostatic generator used a globe of what, rather than the usual sulfur?

He told the Royal Society that it was a 'good electric' decades before that property was widely known.

Which astronomer encouraged and paid for the publication of the Principia?

The whole project grew out of a nine-sheet tract Newton had sent him in 1684, De motu corporum in gyrum.

Which term did Newton coin in his 1684 tract De motu corporum in gyrum?

The tract proved that an inverse-square force toward a centre produces elliptical orbits, the nucleus of the Principia.

Newton used the Latin word 'gravitas' for the effect we call gravity. What does gravitas literally mean?

The same root gives English 'gravity' in the sense of seriousness.

In which edition of the Principia did Newton's line 'hypotheses non fingo' first appear?

It closes the General Scholium, his answer to critics who called gravity an 'occult' force acting at a distance.

How long did Newton famously take to solve Johann Bernoulli's 1696 brachistochrone problem?

He submitted the solution anonymously, but Bernoulli reportedly recognised 'the lion by his claw'.

In 1693 the diarist Samuel Pepys asked Newton for advice on a probability problem involving what?

Pepys had bet on getting three sixes from eighteen throws; Newton showed the six-throw, one-six bet was the safer wager.

Newton's first major mathematical discovery, in 1664-65, was a generalisation of which theorem?

His version works for any exponent, not just whole numbers, and opened the door to his work with infinite series.

Newton sorted the cubic plane curves into how many types?

He published 72 of the 78 'species'; a later manuscript shows he had found all 78 but chose not to print the last six.

Which Chancellor of the Exchequer secured Newton's 1696 appointment as Warden of the Mint?

Montagu, later Earl of Halifax, intended the job as a sinecure; Newton took it seriously enough to hunt criminals in person.

Newton estimated what share of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit?

He answered by making himself a justice of the peace across the home counties and cross-examining more than 100 witnesses and suspects.

In Newton's England, coining counterfeit money was classed as which crime?

The penalty was to be hanged, drawn and quartered, which is why convictions were so hard to secure.

Which serial counterfeiter did Newton successfully prosecute, sending him to the gallows?

He was one of 28 coiners Newton convicted between June 1698 and Christmas 1699.

How did Newton gather much of the evidence against London's counterfeiters himself?

A draft letter about the operation survives tucked into his own first-edition copy of the Principia.

Under Newton, the Mint's weekly output of coin rose from £15,000 to roughly how much?

He also tightened the weight tolerance of guineas and saved the Treasury an estimated 41,510 pounds, several million in today's money.

Newton's 1717 report on the value of the guinea inadvertently moved Britain onto what?

Fixing the guinea at 21 shillings drained silver abroad; historians still debate whether he meant to do it.

From which year did Newton serve as president of the Royal Society until his death?

In the role he made an enemy of the Astronomer Royal by publishing his star catalogue without permission.

Which monarch knighted Newton during a royal visit to Cambridge in 1705?

Historians think the honour had more to do with that May's parliamentary election than with his science or his Mint work.

Newton was only the second scientist to be knighted. Who was the first?

Thomas Jefferson later hung portraits of Bacon, Locke and Newton together as 'the three greatest men that have ever lived'.

As an MP for Cambridge University, what were reportedly Newton's only recorded comments in Parliament?

He sat in 1689 and again in 1701 and complained of a cold draught in the chamber; that, by some accounts, was the sum of his contribution.

Newton lost at least £10,000 when which company's bubble collapsed around 1720?

He was already rich, and still died with an estate of around 30,000 pounds.

Newton was the first scientist to be buried where?

He was given a state funeral, the first in England for a man known chiefly for intellectual achievement, and lay in state for eight days.

A posthumous analysis of Newton's hair found high levels of which element?

It probably came from decades of alchemical experiments and may explain some of his late-life eccentricity.

Newton reportedly refused to eat which meat because the animals were strangled?

He also avoided black pudding because it was made from blood, choices his niece's husband put down to ethics rather than taste.

Of the 1,752 identifiable books in Newton's library, the largest single subject was what?

It accounted for 477 volumes, while books on his famous scientific work made up less than 12 per cent of the shelves.

Of an estimated ten million words in Newton's papers, roughly what fraction deals with alchemy?

Indiana University is putting all of it online under the title 'The Chymistry of Isaac Newton'.

Which economist bought a large share of Newton's papers when they were auctioned at Sotheby's in 1936?

He reassembled about half of the alchemical collection and gave it to Cambridge in 1946.

Newton privately sided with which early Church figure, whose anti-Trinitarian teaching lost to Athanasius at Nicaea?

He hid the belief for life; had it been public, it would have cost him his Cambridge fellowship.

Who passed the falling-apple story to Voltaire, from whom it spread to the world?

Newton told the story himself, but the version in which the apple hits his head is a later embellishment.

The apple tree still growing at Woolsthorpe Manor appears identical to which variety?

It is a coarse cooking apple; the tree blew over around 1816, regrew from its roots and is now a tourist attraction.

Newton appeared on which Bank of England banknote from 1978 to 1988?

They were the last one-pound notes the Bank ever issued, showing him with a book, a telescope, a prism and a map of the Solar System.

On Lev Landau's logarithmic scale of physicists, what rank did Newton receive?

Einstein got 0.5, the founders of quantum mechanics 1, and Landau modestly gave himself a 2.

The SI unit named after Newton measures which quantity?

One newton accelerates a one-kilogram mass at one metre per second squared.

Which poet wrote the epitaph beginning 'Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night'?

The couplet was not allowed on his Westminster monument, which carries a long Latin inscription instead.

Newton wrote 'standing on the shoulders of giants' in a 1675 letter to whom?

Some historians read it as a dig at the recipient, who was reputedly short and hunchbacked, rather than as pure modesty.

Newton first noticed what is now called the Magnus effect while watching which sport at Cambridge?

He described how a ball struck obliquely with spin curved in flight, nearly two centuries before Heinrich Magnus studied it.

Which Astronomer Royal did Newton antagonise by prematurely publishing his star catalogue?

Newton had leaned on the Historia Coelestis Britannica for his own lunar studies and pushed it into print in 1712.

Which Swiss mathematician, once close to Newton, started rewriting the Principia in 1691?

Their friendship broke down in 1693 and the new edition was never finished; Fatio later accused Leibniz of plagiarism.

How old was Newton when he died in his sleep in London in March 1727?

He received a state funeral, the first in England for someone honoured chiefly for intellectual achievement, with two dukes and three earls as pallbearers.