Notable alumni and academics

Over the course of its history, a number of Cambridge University academics and alumni have become notable in their fields, both academic and in the wider world. As of October 2020, 121 affiliates of the University of Cambridge have won 122 Nobel prizes (Frederick Sanger won twice), with 70 former students of the university having won the prize. In addition, as of 2019, Cambridge alumni, faculty members and researchers have won 11 Fields Medals and 7 Turing Awards.

Mathematics and sciencesedit

Among the most famous of Cambridge natural philosophers is Sir Isaac Newton, who conducted many of his experiments in the grounds of Trinity College. Others are Sir Francis Bacon, who was responsible for the development of the scientific method and the mathematicians John Dee and Brook Taylor. Pure mathematicians include G. H. Hardy, John Edensor Littlewood, Mary Cartwright and Augustus De Morgan; Sir Michael Atiyah, a specialist in geometry; William Oughtred, inventor of the logarithmic scale; John Wallis, first to state the law of acceleration; Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught genius who made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions; and James Clerk Maxwell, who brought about the "second great unification of physics" (the first being accredited to Newton) with his classical theory of electromagnetic radiation. In 1890, mathematician Philippa Fawcett was the person with the highest score in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams, but as a woman was unable to take the title of 'Senior Wrangler'.

In biology, Charles Darwin, famous for developing the theory of natural selection, was an alumnus of Christ's College, although his education was intended to allow him to become a clergyman. Biologists Francis Crick and James Watson worked out a model for the three-dimensional structure of DNA while working at the Cavendish Laboratory; Cambridge graduates Maurice Wilkins and especially Rosalind Franklin produced key X-ray crystallography data, which was shared with Watson by Wilkins. Wilkins went on to help verify the proposed structure and win the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick. More recently, Sir Ian Wilmut was part of the team responsible for the first cloning of a mammal (Dolly the Sheep in 1996), naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough, ethologist Jane Goodall, expert on chimpanzees was a PhD student, anthropologist Dame Alison Richard, former vice-chancellor of the university, and Frederick Sanger, a biochemist known for developing Sanger sequencing and receiving two Nobel prizes.

Despite the university's delay in admitting women to full degrees, Cambridge women were at the heart of scientific research throughout the 20th century. Notable female scientists include; biochemist Marjory Stephenson, plant physiologist Gabrielle Howard, social anthropologist Audrey Richards, psycho-analyst Alix Strachey, who with her husband translated the works of Sigmund Freud, Kavli Prize-winner Brenda Milner, co-discovery of specialised brain networks for memory and cognition. Veterinary epidemiologist Sarah Cleaveland has worked to eliminate rabies in the Serengeti.

The university can be considered the birthplace of the computer, mathematician and "father of the computer" Charles Babbage designed the world's first computing system as early as the mid-1800s. Alan Turing went on to devise what is essentially the basis for modern computing and Maurice Wilkes later created the first programmable computer. The webcam was also invented at Cambridge University, showing the Trojan Room coffee pot in the Computer Laboratories.

In physics, Ernest Rutherford who is regarded as the father of nuclear physics, spent much of his life at the university where he worked closely with E. J. Williams and Niels Bohr, a major contributor to the understanding of the atom, J. J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron, Sir James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, and Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, responsible for first splitting the atom. J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, also studied under Rutherford and Thomson. Joan Curran devised the 'chaff' technique during the Second World War to disrupt radar on enemy planes.

Astronomers Sir John Herschel, Sir Arthur Eddington, Paul Dirac, the discoverer of antimatter and one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics; Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist and the university's long-serving Lucasian Professor of Mathematics until 2009; and Lord Martin Rees, the current Astronomer Royal and former Master of Trinity College. John Polkinghorne, a mathematician before his entrance into the Anglican ministry, received the Templeton Prize for his work reconciling science and religion.

Other significant scientists include Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen; Frank Whittle, co-inventor of the jet engine; William Thomson (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, one of the fathers of radio science; Lord Rayleigh, who made extensive contributions to both theoretical and experimental physics in the 20th century; and Georges Lemaître, who first proposed a Big Bang theory.

Humanities, music and artedit

In the humanities, Greek studies were inaugurated at Cambridge in the early sixteenth century by Desiderius Erasmus; contributions to the field were made by Richard Bentley and Richard Porson. John Chadwick was associated with Michael Ventris in the decipherment of Linear B. The Latinist A. E. Housman taught at Cambridge but is more widely known as a poet. Simon Ockley made a significant contribution to Arabic Studies.

Distinguished Cambridge academics include economists such as John Maynard Keynes, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Marshall, Milton Friedman, Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa, Ha-Joon Chang and Amartya Sen, a former Master of Trinity College. Philosophers Sir Francis Bacon, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leo Strauss, George Santayana, G. E. M. Anscombe, Sir Karl Popper, Sir Bernard Williams, Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal and G. E. Moore were all Cambridge scholars, as were historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, Frederic William Maitland, Lord Acton, Joseph Needham, E. H. Carr, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Rhoda Dorsey, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Quentin Skinner, Niall Ferguson and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and famous lawyers such as Glanville Williams, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and Sir Edward Coke.

Religious figures have included Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury and his predecessors; William Tyndale, the biblical translator; Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley, known as the "Oxford martyrs" from the place of their execution; Benjamin Whichcote and the Cambridge Platonists; William Paley, the Christian philosopher known primarily for formulating the teleological argument for the existence of God; William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, largely responsible for the abolition of the slave trade; Evangelical churchman Charles Simeon; John William Colenso, the bishop of Natal who developed views on the interpretation of Scripture and relations with native peoples that seemed dangerously radical at the time; John Bainbridge Webster and David F. Ford, theologians; and six winners of the Templeton Prize, the highest accolade for the study of religion since its foundation in 1972.

Composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, William Sterndale Bennett, Orlando Gibbons and, more recently, Alexander Goehr, Thomas Adès, John Rutter, Julian Anderson and Judith Weir were all at Cambridge. The university has also produced instrumentalists and conductors, including Colin Davis, John Eliot Gardiner, Roger Norrington, Trevor Pinnock, Andrew Manze, Richard Egarr, Mark Elder, Richard Hickox, Christopher Hogwood, Andrew Marriner, David Munrow, Simon Standage, Endellion Quartet and Fitzwilliam Quartet. Although known primarily for its choral music, the university has also produced members of contemporary bands such as Radiohead, Hot Chip, Procol Harum, Clean Bandit, Sports Team songwriter and entertainer Jonathan King, Henry Cow, and the singer-songwriter Nick Drake.

Artists Quentin Blake, Roger Fry, Rose Ferraby and Julian Trevelyan, sculptors Antony Gormley, Marc Quinn and Sir Anthony Caro, and photographers Antony Armstrong-Jones, Sir Cecil Beaton and Mick Rock all attended as undergraduates.

Literatureedit

Writers to have studied at the university include the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, his fellow University Wits Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene, arguably the first professional authors in England, and John Fletcher, who collaborated with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII and the lost Cardenio and succeeded him as house playwright of The King's Men. Samuel Pepys matriculated in 1650, known for his diary, the original manuscripts of which are now housed in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College. Lawrence Sterne, whose novel Tristram Shandy is judged to have inspired many modern narrative devices and styles. In the following century, the novelists W. M. Thackeray, best known for Vanity Fair, Charles Kingsley, author of Westward Ho! and Water Babies, and Samuel Butler, remembered for The Way of All Flesh and Erewhon, were all at Cambridge.

Ghost story writer M. R. James served as provost of King's College from 1905 to 1918. Novelist Amy Levy was the first Jewish woman to attend the university. Modernist writers to have attended the university include E. M. Forster, Rosamond Lehmann, Vladimir Nabokov, Christopher Isherwood and Malcolm Lowry. Although not a student, Virginia Woolf wrote her essay A Room of One's Own while in residence at Newnham College. Playwright J. B. Priestley, physicist and novelist C. P. Snow and children's writer A. A. Milne were also among those who passed through the university in the early 20th century. They were followed by the postmodernists Patrick White, J. G. Ballard, and the early postcolonial writer E. R. Braithwaite. More recently, alumni include comedy writers Douglas Adams, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson, the popular novelists A. S. Byatt, Sir Salman Rushdie, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Louise Dean, Robert Harris and Sebastian Faulks, the action writers Michael Crichton, David Gibbins and Jin Yong, and contemporary playwrights and screenwriters such as Julian Fellowes, Stephen Poliakoff, Michael Frayn and Sir Peter Shaffer.

Cambridge poets include Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, the Metaphysical poets John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, John Milton, renowned for his late epic Paradise Lost, the Restoration poet and playwright John Dryden, the pre-romantic Thomas Gray, best known his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose joint work Lyrical Ballads is often seen to mark the beginning of the Romantic movement, later Romantics such as Lord Byron and the postromantic Alfred, Lord Tennyson, authors of the best known carpe diem poems including Robert Herrick best known "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" with the first line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" and Andrew Marvell who authored "To His Coy Mistress", classical scholar and lyric poet A. E. Housman, war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke, modernist T. E. Hulme, confessional poets Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman, and, more recently, Cecil Day-Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, Kathleen Raine and Geoffrey Hill. At least nine of the Poets Laureate graduated from Cambridge. The university has also made a notable contribution to literary criticism, having produced, among others, F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards, C. K. Ogden and William Empson, often collectively known as the Cambridge Critics, the Marxists Raymond Williams, sometimes regarded as the founding father of cultural studies, and Terry Eagleton, author of Literary Theory: An Introduction, the most successful academic book ever published, the Aesthetician Harold Bloom, the New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, and biographical writers such as Lytton Strachey, a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin.

Actors and directors such as Sir Ian McKellen, Eleanor Bron, Miriam Margolyes, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Michael Redgrave, James Mason, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, John Oliver, Freddie Highmore, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Simon Russell Beale, Tilda Swinton, Thandie Newton, Georgie Henley, Rachel Weisz, Sacha Baron Cohen, Tom Hiddleston, Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Eddie Redmayne, Dan Stevens, Jamie Bamber, Lily Cole, David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins all studied at the university, as did directors such as Mike Newell, Sam Mendes, Stephen Frears, Paul Greengrass, Chris Weitz and John Madden.

Sportsedit

Athletes who are university graduates or attendees have won a total of 194 Olympic medals, including 88 gold. The legendary Chinese six-time world table tennis champion Deng Yaping; the sprinter and athletics hero Harold Abrahams; the inventors of the modern game of football, H. de Winton and J. C. Thring; and George Mallory, the famed mountaineer all attended Cambridge.

Educationedit

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 public school (i.e. not public) in England; Anil Kumar Gain, 20th century mathematician and founder of the Vidyasagar University in Bengal, and Menachem Ben-Sasson, Israeli President of Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Politicsedit

Cambridge has a strong reputation in the fields of politics, having educated:better source needed

• Fourteen British Prime Ministers, including Robert Walpole, considered to be the first Prime Minister of Great Britain.
• At least 30 foreign Heads of State/Government, including presidents of India, Ireland, Zambia, South Korea, Uganda and Trinidad and Tobago; along with Prime Ministers of India, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, New Zealand, Poland, Australia, France, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malta, Thailand, Malaysia, and Jordan.
• At least nine monarchs, including Edward VII, George VI, King Peter II of Yugoslavia, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and Queen Sofía of Spain. The university has also educated Charles, Prince of Wales and a large number of other royals.
• Three signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence (Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Thomas Nelson, Jr.).better source needed
• Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (1653–58).