Mathematics and science of the
University of Cambridge
Perhaps most of all, the university is well known for a long and distinguished
tradition in mathematics and the sciences.
Among the most famous of Cambridge natural philosophers is Sir Isaac Newton,
who spent most of his life at the university and conducted many of his now
famous experiments on the grounds of Trinity College. Sir Francis Bacon,
responsible for the development of the scientific method, entered the
university when he was just twelve, and pioneering mathematicians John Dee and
Brook Taylor soon followed.
Other ground-breaking mathematicians to have studied at the university include
Hardy, Littlewood and De Morgan, three of the most renowned pure mathematicians
in modern history, Sir Michael Atiyah, one of the leading mathematicians of the
last half century, William Oughtred, the inventor of logarithmic scale, John
Wallis, the inventor of modern calculus, Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught
genius who made incomparable contributions to mathematical analysis, number
theory, infinite series and continued fractions and, perhaps most importantly
of all, James Clerk Maxwell, which is considered to have given rise to the
second great unification of Physics (the first to be accredited to Newton) with
his classical electromagnetic theory.
In biology, Charles Darwin, famous for developing the theory of natural
selection, was a Cambridge man, despite his education at the university was
intended to allow it to become a clergyman. Subsequent Cambridge biologists
include Francis Crick and James Watson, who developed a model of the three
dimensional structure of DNA whilst working at the Cavendish Laboratory of the
University along with major X-ray crystallographer Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind
Franklin. More recently, Sir Ian Wilmut, the man who was responsible for the
first cloning of a mammal with Dolly the sheep in 1996, was a graduate student
at the University of Darwin. Famous naturalist and broadcaster David
Attenborough graduated from college, while the ethologist Jane Goodall, the
world's foremost expert on chimpanzees did a PhD in Ethology at Darwin College.
College can be considered the birthplace of the computer with mathematician
Charles Babbage having designed computer system for the first time the world as
early as the mid-1800s. Alan Turing went on to conceive what is essentially the
basis of the modern computer and Maurice Wilkes later created the first
programmable computer. The webcam was also invented at Cambridge University, as
a means for scientists to avoid interrupting their research and going all the
way to the laboratory dining room only to be disappointed by empty coffee pot.
Ernest Rutherford, generally regarded as the father of nuclear physics spent
much of his life in college, where he worked closely with the likes of Niels
Bohr, a major contributor to the understanding of the structure and function of
the atom, JJ Thomson, discoverer of the electron, Sir James Chadwick,
discoverer of the neutron, and Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, the
partnership responsible for first splitting the atom. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, also studied
at Cambridge under Rutherford and Thompson.
Astronomers Sir John Herschel and Sir Arthur Eddington both spent much of his
career at Cambridge, as Paul Dirac, the discoverer of antimatter and one of the
pioneers of quantum mechanics, Stephen Hawking, the founding father of the
study of the singularities and the University of Long-serving Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics until 2009, and Lord Martin Rees, the current
Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College. John Polkinghorne, Cambridge mathematician
also before its entry into the Anglican ministry, he was knighted and received
the Templeton Prize for his work to reconcile science and religion.
Other significant Cambridge scientists include Henry Cavendish, the discoverer
of hydrogen, Frank Whittle, co-inventor of the jet engine, Lord Kelvin, who
formulated the original Laws of Thermodynamics, William Fox Talbot, who
invented the camera, Alfred North Whitehead, Einstein major opponent, Sir
Jagadish Chandra Bose, the man known as "the father of radio
science", Lord Rayleigh, one of the most eminent physicists of the 20th
century, Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang theory, and Frederick
Sanger, the last man to win two Nobel prizes.
