Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643. He was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. His father, also Isaac Newton, was a farmer. Unfortunately, Isaac Newton's father died before he was born. Isaac Newton's father could neither read nor write. Three years later, Hannah Ayscough, Isaac Newton's mother, married a clergyman. Newton disliked his mother's new husband and went to live with his grandmother. As a teenager he even threatened to burn down their house. When Newton was 12, he attended King's School, Grantham. He was taught the classics, not science or mathematics. When Newton turned 17, his mother took him out of school so he could become a farmer like his father. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Shortly thereafter, Newton discovered that he was no good at farming and that he did not want to become a farmer. His mother allowed him to return to school. Newton finished as one of the top students. When Isaac Newton was 18, he began studying for a law degree at Trinity College, Cambridge University. He earned money as a personal servant of the richest students. In his third year of college, Newton studied a lot of mathematics and physics. He was also very interested in pseudoscience. Newton began to ignore the ideas taught to him in his classes because his physics classes based their teachings on the erroneous ideas of Aristotle of ancient Greece. He preferred to study the more scientifically correct ideas of Galileo, Boyle, Descartes and Kepler. By reading and studying the scientists mentioned above, Newton became more ambitious in making his own discoveries. He began writing notes to himself in which he asked questions that science had not yet answered, such as questions about gravity, the nature of light, the nature of color and vision, and atoms. After his third year at Cambridge, he won a four-year scholarship during which he devoted himself completely to academic studies. Newton's first discovery was made during the second year of his four-year fellowship. In mathematics he discovered the generalized binomial theorem. In the same year he also obtained a three-year degree. Newton returned home to Woolsthorpe after the Great Plague forced Cambridge to close. When Newton turned 24, he returned to Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College. Fellows were individuals engaged in a wide variety of studies and were responsible for maintaining the college as a place of education, learning, and research. A year later, Newton earned an MA. When Newton was 26, Isaac Barrow, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Trinity College, resigned. He suggested that Newton should be the one to succeed him. Newton was named Barrow's replacement. Barrow said, “Mr. Newton, a fellow of our College, and very young, being only the second year master of art; but an extraordinary genius and competence.”. Isaac Newton made many discoveries in his life. He proved that sunlight is made up of all the colors of the rainbow. He did this by using a glass prism to split a ray of sunlight into its different colors. He then used another prism to recombine the colors to form a beam of light again. Newton discovered calculus or the mathematics of change. Its development was influenced by the work of Pierre de Fermat, who showed specific examples where calculus-like methods could be used. Newton conceived the ideas of differential calculus, integral calculus, and differential equations. Without calculus we would not be able to understand the behavior of objects like electrons and have modern physics and physical chemistry. Biology and economics do too:.