The Apprenticeship Of Genius

Abstract

Abstract Isaac Newton took three days to traverse the roughly sixty miles separating his family’s manor house in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and Cambridge University. He arrived there on the evening of June 4, 1661, and presented himself the following day to the dean of Trinity College. After entering his name in the College’s admissions book, Newton was assigned a tutor – Benjamin Pulleyn, a respected classicist who would become Regius Professor of Greek in 1674 – and directed to his chamber. Born in the early hours of Christmas Day 1642, Newton was eighteen-and-a-half years old that summer, somewhat older than most incoming undergraduates – a reflection of his twice-widowed mother’s reluctance to make her son a scholar instead of a helpmate in managing the family estate.