Which Cambridge degree did Newton receive in 1665?

Isaac Newton received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge University in 1665. He was then an undergraduate at Trinity College, where his private studies were already moving beyond the standard university curriculum.

Newton entered Trinity in 1661 and initially paid for his education as a subsizar, performing service duties. A scholarship later supported him. In January 1665, he took his BA degree; the university’s academic year and degree terminology can make the date look different in some accounts, but the qualification itself was a Bachelor of Arts.

Soon afterward, Cambridge was disrupted by the Great Plague. Newton left Cambridge for Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, where the forced retreat became one of the most productive periods of his life. During 1665 and 1666, he developed important ideas connected with calculus, optics and gravitation.

Readers sometimes confuse this degree with Newton’s later Master of Arts. He became an MA in 1668, after being elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1667. His famous scientific breakthroughs therefore followed, rather than preceded, his 1665 BA.