Notable alumni and academics

See also: List of University of Cambridge members, Category:Alumni of the University of Cambridge, and Category:Academics of the University of Cambridge

Cambridge University has over the course of its history built up a sizeable number of alumni who are notable in their fields, both academic, and in the wider world. Depending on criteria, affiliates of the University of Cambridge have won between 84 and 87 Nobel prizes, more than any other institution according to some counts. Former undergraduates of the university have won a grand total of 61 Nobel prizes, 13 more than the undergraduates of any other university. Cambridge academics have also won 8 Fields Medals and 2 Abel Prizes (since the award was first distributed in 2003).

Perhaps most of all, the university is renowned for a long and distinguished tradition in mathematics and the sciences.

Sir Isaac Newton

Among the most famous of Cambridge polymaths is Sir Isaac Newton, who spent the majority of his life at the university and conducted many of his now famous experiments within 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, arguably the most important mathematician of the last half-century; William Oughtred, the inventor of the 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;

Charles Darwin

and, perhaps most importantly of all, James Clerk Maxwell, who is also considered to have brought about the second great unification of Physics (the first being accredited to Newton) with his classical electromagnetic theory.

Another Cambridge scholar responsible for major developments in scientific understanding was Charles Darwin, the biologist who first suggested the theory of evolution. Later Cambridge biologists include Francis Crick and James D. Watson, who developed a model for the three-dimensional structure of DNA whilst working at the university's Cavendish Laboratory along with Maurice Wilkins and leading female X-ray chrystallographer 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 an undergraduate at Darwin College.

The university is also the essential birthplace of the computer with mathematician Charles Babbage having designed the world's first computing system as early as the mid-1800s. Alan Turing went on to invent what is essentially the basis for the modern computer and Maurice Wilkes later created the first programmable computer. The webcam was also invented at Cambridge University, somewhat infamously, as a means for scientists to avoid interrupting their research and going all the way down the to the laboratory dining room only to be disappointed by an empty coffee pot.

Stephen Hawking

Ernest Rutherford, the man generally regarded to be the father of nuclear physics spent much of his life at the university, where he worked closely with the likes of Niels Bohr, a major contributor to the understanding of the structure and function of the atom, J. J. Thompson, 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, leader of the Manhattan Project and de facto inventor of the atomic bomb, also studied at Cambridge under Rutherford and Thompson.

Major astronomers John Herschel and Sir Arthur Eddington both spent much of their careers at Cambridge, as did Paul Dirac, the discoverer of antimatter and one of the pioneers of Quantum Mechanics; Stephen Hawking, the founding father of the study of singularities and the university's long-serving Lucasian Professor of Mathematics; and Lord Martin Rees, the current Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College.

John Maynard Keynes

A number of 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's major opponent; Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the man dubbed the “the father of radio science”; Lord Rayleigh, one of the most pre-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.

Other Cambridge academics include major economists such as John Maynard Keynes, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Marshall, Milton Friedman, Piero Sraffa and Amartya Sen, another former Master of Trinity College.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Significant Philosophers Desiderius Erasmus, Sir Francis Bacon, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leo Strauss, George Santayana, Sir Karl Popper, Allama Iqbal and G. E. Moore were all Cambridge scholars, as were renowned historians such as Lord Acton, E. H. Carr, Hugh Trevor-Roper, E. P. Thompson and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Religious figures at the university have included Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury and many of his predecessors; William Tyndale, the early biblical translator responsible for much of the King James "Authorised Version"; William Paley, the Christian philosopher known primarily for formulating the teleological argument for the existence of God; William Wilberforce, the man responsible for the abolition of the slave trade; and six winners of the prestigious Templeton Prize, the highest accolade for the study of religion since its foundation in 1972.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Charles Villers Stanford, William Sterndale Bennett, Orlando Gibbons and, more recently, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Thomas Adès and Julian Anderson were all at Cambridge.

Artists Quentin Blake, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell also attended as undergraduates.

Acclaimed writers such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Charles Kingsley, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Marlowe, Vladmir Nabokov, Samuel Butler, W. M. Thackeray, Lawrence Sterne, Sir Hugh Walpole, Jin Yong, Sir Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, J. G. Ballard, John Fletcher, E. R. Braithwaite,

Virginia Woolf

Iris Murdoch, J. B. Priestley, Patrick White, M. R. James and A. A. Milne were all at Cambridge.

More recently A. S. Byatt, Douglas Adams, Sir Salman Rushdie, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Robert Harris, Sebastian Faulks, Stephen Poliakoff, Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett and Sir Peter Shaffer all studied at the university.

Poets A. E. Houseman, Robert Herrick, William Wordsworth, John Donne, Alfred Tennyson, Lord Byron, Rupert Brooke, John Dryden, Siegfried Sassoon, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, John Milton, George Herbert, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Gray, Edmund Spenser and Sir Muhammad Iqbal

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

are all associated with Cambridge, as are renowned literary critics F. R. Leavis, Sir William Empson, Lytton Strachey, I. A. Richards, Christopher Isherwood and Peter Ackroyd. Furthermore, at least nine of the Poet Laureates graduated from Cambridge.

Actors and directors such as Lord Richard Attenborough, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Michael Redgrave, James Mason, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Simon Russell Beale, Tilda Swinton, Thandie Newton, Rachel Weisz and Sacha Baron Cohen all studied at the university, as did recently acclaimed directors such as Mike Newell, Sam Mendes, Stephen Frears, Paul Greengrass and John Madden.

King George VI

The University is also known for its prodigious sporting reputation and has produced many fine athletes, including more than 50 Olympic medalists (6 in 2008 alone); the legendary Chineese six-time world table tennis champion Deng Yaping; the sprinter and athletics hero Harold Abrahams; the inventors of the modern game of Football, Winton and Thring; and George Mallory, the famed mountaineer and possibly the first man ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Notable educationalists to have attended the university include the founders and early professors of Harvard University, including John Harvard himself; Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, the first residential higher education institution for women, and John Haden Badley, founder of the first mixed-sex school in England.

Oliver Cromwell

Cambridge also has a strong reputation in the fields of politics and governance, having educated:

• 15 British Prime Ministers, including Robert Walpole (First Prime Minister of Great Britain).
• At least 23 foreign Heads of State or Heads of Government, including three Prime Ministers of India, two Prime Ministers of Singapore, two Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka, Stanley Bruce (Prime Minister of Australia) and Tunku Abdul Rahman (first Prime Minister of Malaysia).
• At least 9 monarchs and a large number of other royals.
• 3 Signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence.
• The Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 887