Isaac Newton 2

 Born in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, Newton was the only son of a local yeoman, of Isaac Newton, who had died three months before, and of Hannah Ayscough. That same year, at Arcetri, near Florence, Galileo Galilei had died. Newton would eventually pick up his idea of a mathematical science of motion and bring his work to full fruition. A tiny and weak baby, Newton was not expected to survive his first day of life, much less 84 years. Deprived of a father before birth, he soon lost his mother as well, for within two years she married a second time; her husband, the well-to-do minister Barnabas Smith, left young Isaac with his grandmother and moved to a neighboring village to raise a son and two daughters. For nine years, until the death of Barnabas Smith in 1653, Isaac was effectively separated from his mother, and his pronounced psychotic tendencies have been ascribed to this traumatic event. We can be certain that he despised his stepfather. When he examined the state of his soul in 1662 and compiled a catalog of sins in shorthand, he remembered "threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them." The acute sense of insecurity that rendered him obsessively anxious when his work was published and irrationally violent when he defended it accompanied Newton throughout his life and can plausibly be traced to his early years.