==Life==
Newton was born on Christmas day December 25, 1642<ref> He was born a little more that a year after Galileo died. Italy and England used different calendarscalenders, however, so there is a mistake to the effect they died in the same year. Galileo died in 1641 by the English calendarcalender. </ref> in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire; his father, also Isaac, died before his birth. The senior Isaac (1606–1642) was an illiterate farmer who left extensive lands as well as goods worth £459, including a flock of 235 sheep and a herd of 46 cattle. The annual income was about £150, and Newton drew on that income to supplement his college fellowship while at Cambridge. The Newtons were a well-to-do, upwardly mobile family of farmers, but never had a prominent member. When he was a little more than two years old, his mother Hannah (1610–1679), remarried, and his upbringing was taken over by his maternal grandmother. He began his schooling in neighboring villages, and, at ten, was sent to the grammar school at Grantham, the nearest town of any size. He boarded during terms at the house of an apothecary from whom he may have derived his lifelong interest in chemistry. The young Newton seems to have been a quiet, not particularly bookish, lad, but very ready with his hands; he made sun dials, model windmills, a water clock, a mechanical carriage, and flew kites with lanterns attached to their tails. Throughout his life he built mechanical devices and fashioned his own tools for high-precision work.
In 1656, Newton's mother, on the death of her second husband, returned to Woolsthorpe and took her son out of school with the idea of making him a farmer. He hated farming. His mother, after considerable persuasion by his teacher at Grantham, who had recognized his intellectual gifts, allowed him to prepare for entrance to [[Cambridge University]]. In June 1661, he was admitted to prestigious Trinity College as a lowly "sub-sizar" (a student required to do work-study). The main curriculum was the study of Aristotle, but early in 1664, as Newton's notebooks indicate, he began an intensive self-study of geometry, Copernican astronomy and optics. On his own he read Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Galileo, Robert Boyle, Thomas Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, Joseph Glanville, and Henry More. He was a loner with only one friend, but he was stimulated by the distinguished mathematician and theologian Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, who recognized Newton's genius and did all he could to foster it.
John Conduitt, the husband of Newton's niece had this to say about Newton's theology.
"I had no hesitation when writing the Like of Sir Isaac Newton in 1830, in coming to the conclusions that he was a believer in the Trinity; and in giving this opinion on the creed of so great a man, and so indefatigable a student of scripture, I was well aware that there are various forms of Trinitarian truth, and various modes of expressing it, which have been received as orthodox in the purest societies of the Christian Church."<ref>Thomas C. Pfizenmaier - Was Isaac Newton an Arian?. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-5037(199701)58:1<57:WINAA>2%3A1%3C57%3AWINAA%3E2.0.CO;2%3B2-O</ref>
In an effort to debunk widespread claims of his time that the world would be ending soon, Newton wrote a private manuscript estimating that the world would not end prior to the year A.D. 2060.<ref>http://www.isaac-newton.org/newton_2060.htm</ref>
* Berlinski, David. ''Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World.'' (2000). 256 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Gift-Newton-Unlocked-System/dp/0743217764/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345336&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Buchwald, Jed Z. and Cohen, I. Bernard, eds. ''Isaac Newton's Natural Philosophy.'' MIT Press, 2001. 354 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Natural-Philosophy-Institute-Technology/dp/0262524252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196345369&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Casini, P. "Newton's Principia and the Philosophers of the Enlightenment." ''Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London'' 1988 42(1): 35-52. Issn: 0035-9149 Fulltext: [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0035-9149(198801)42:1<35:N'ATPO>2%28198801%2942%3A1%3C35%3AN%27ATPO%3E2.0.CO;2%3B2-H Jstor]
* Christianson, Gale E. ''Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution.'' Oxford U. Press, 1996. 160 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Isaac-Newton-Lives-Legacies-Christianson/dp/019530070X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196337095&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Christianson, Gale E. ''In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times.'' (1984). 608 pp.
* Newton, Isaac. ''The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.'' U. of California Press, (1999). 974 pp.
* Newton, Isaac. ''The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton. Vol. 1: The Optical Lectures, 1670-1672.'' Cambridge U. Press, 1984. 627 pp.
* Newton, Isaac. ''Opticks'' (4th ed. 1730) [http://books.google.com/books?id=GnAFAAAAQAAJ&dq=newton+opticks&pg=PP1&ots=Nnl345oqo_&sig=0mBTaXUI_K6w-JDEu_RvVq5TNqc&prev=http://www.google.com/search?q=newton+opticks&rls=com%3Fq%3Dnewton%2Bopticks%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF%26ie%3DUTF-8&oe=UTF%26oe%3DUTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLJ%26sourceid%3Die7%26rlz%3D1I7GGLJ&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail online edition]
* Newton, Isaac. ''The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton,'' 8 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1967–81).
* Newton, Isaac. ''The correspondence of Isaac Newton,'' ed. H. W. Turnbull and others, 7 vols. (1959–77).