January

Sir Isaac Newton, English mathematician and scientist, was born on Christmas Day according to the old Julian calendar 1642, but to the Gregorian calendar this happy event took place on 4^{thJanuary 1643. By all accounts Newton was an unhappy, or at least an unlucky child. His father died before he was born and his mother, when she remarried, left Isaac, aged three, to the care of his grandmother. Newton went to Cambridge when he was 18, graduated at 22 and became Fellow of Trinity College in 1667. There are several notebooks that Newton kept during his lifetime, including the one we just mentioned. From his Mathematical Notebook, kept in the Cambridge University Library, we learn about the mathematical investigations he undertook around 1664-1665. Newton was a busy man and yet he found time to write approximately a million words on alchemy. Alchemy is a type of proto-science, a tradition that originated in ancient Egypt and spread around the world.}