Isaac Barrow | Biography

Isaac Barrow is noted for his contributions to the field of optics. He is also remembered as the professor who served as inspiration and mentor to Isaac Newton.

Barrow was born in London. His father, Thomas, was a merchant who served as linen draper to King Charles I. Barrow's mother, Anne, died shortly after his birth. Barrow attended Charterhouse, a school noted for its emphasis on a classical education. He was a rowdy youngster, more interested in scrapping with other students than studying. Barrow was transferred to Felsted School in Essex, where it was hoped that schoolmaster Martin Holbeach's strict discipline would correct his bad habits and promote scholastic achievement.

Barrow stayed at Felsted for four years, thriving on the social and academic discipline it offered. He studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, logic, and the classics. When Barrow's father suffered financial losses when a rebellion destroyed textile trade with Ireland, Barrow began tutoring Thomas Fairfax, fourth viscount Fairfax of Emely, Ireland. In 1646, Barrow finally secured a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Barrow earned his baccalaureate in 1648 and was elected as a college fellow in 1649. He completed an M.A. in 1652 and was named a college lecturer and university examiner.

Barrow completed what would be his first published work in 1654, Euclidis Elementorum libri XV, a highly regard translation of Euclid. Designed as an undergraduate text, the work was reissued in 1657 and eventually reached a wide public in a pocket-sized edition. In 1655, Barrow was nominated for a prestigious professorship in Greek. But this was the decade of Cromwell, and Barrow had never bothered to hide his loyalty to the monarchy. The Regius Professorship went to Ralph Widdrington, a candidate who had the backing of the university's chancellor--Oliver Cromwell.

Frustrated and angry, Barrow sold his books, applied for and won a Trinity College traveling fellowship, and left England. He traveled to France, Italy, and Turkey, lingering abroad for nearly five years. It was during his travels that his interest in mathematics intensified, as he came into contact not only with classical scholars like himself, but scientists and mathematicians.

Barrow returned to England in 1660, the year King Charles II was restored to England's throne. He immediately was ordained in the Anglican Church and was promptly appointed to the Regius Professorship of Greek.

Barrow supplemented the modest pay of a professor of classics by accepting a professorship of geometry at Gresham College and filling in as a professor of astronomy. When he was named Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1663, however, the stipend attached to the professorship made it possible for him to give up extra teaching appointments. In that same year Barrow was the first to be named a fellow of the newly established Royal Society of London; it was in that capacity that in 1664 he served as a scholarship examiner for Isaac Newton. Apparently Barrow's wit and knowledge made an impression, and Newton began attending Barrow's lectures on optics.

Between 1663 and 1669, Barrow developed and presented the Lectiones geometricae, a series of lectures on geometry in which he defined time as the measure of motion, the properties of curves generated when moving points and lines are combined, the construction of tangents and the nature of quadrature.Although the combined lectures include elements key to the fundamentals of calculus theory, the work is not original. Barrow relied on contemporary mathematicians--including René Descartes, John Wallis, and James Gregory--for the information; his genius lay in combining these works into a comprehensible whole and relaying the results to a new generation of scholars.

Barrow is credited with developing the method of finding the point of refraction at a plane interface and the point construction of the diacuastic of a spherical interface. His work seems to have served as the starting point for Newton's ideas, although the most Newton admitted was that Barrow's lectures "might put me upon considering the generation of figures by motion, tho I no now remember it."

Barrow's work in opticswas quickly eclipsed by Newton's. Influenced both by Newton's genius and the tug of other interests, Barrow stepped down as Lucasian professor in favor of Newton in 1669.

Barrow devoted his energies to theology and served as royal chaplain in London. He returned to Trinity College in 1673 at the king's request and was appointed vice chancellor in 1675.

Barrow never married; he died in 1677, and contemporary accounts indicate his death at the age of 47 was the result of a drug overdose.