Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is one of the oldest universities in the world (or, at least, in Europe, not to prejudge the claims of several Islamic institutions to that title).
It was founded only a little more than a century after the University of Bologna (1088) and the University of Oxford (1096) – which are the oldest and second-oldest universities in Europe – and about half a century after the University of Paris (1150). Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world, after Oxford.
With more than 800 years of continuous operation, Cambridge has been home to a great many luminaries of the academic firmament during this long expanse of time. Without a doubt, the brightest of these by far was Isaac Newton, who most would say is the greatest scientist who ever lived (a minority holds out for Albert Einstein). Newton was mostly in residence at Cambridge from 1661 until 1706, first as a student and then a professor, attaining the distinctions of Fellow of Trinity College and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the university.
If no eminent thinker other than Newton had ever dwelled there, Cambridge would still have a considerable claim to academic eminence – but, of course, that is far from the case.
For example, the great English classicist Richard Bentley – only half a generation younger than Newton – both studied and taught there. Earlier in the seventeenth century, Cambridge had been home to the essayist and philosopher, Francis Bacon, as well as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, while Shakespeare’s rival and sometime collaborator, the playwright (and possible secret agent) Christopher Marlowe, received his education here. Overlapping with Newton was also a highly influential group of philosophers known collectively as the “Cambridge Platonists,” who included most notably Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, as well as several other thinkers of some repute. Moreover, two of the greatest English poets of all time, John Donne and John Milton, also studied at Cambridge during the remarkable seventeenth century.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Cambridge was home to:
Moving to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we find that a total of around 120 Nobel laureates have been connected to Cambridge, some of whom stand among the ranks of highly distinguished scientists crowding into the history books just behind Newton and Einstein. For instance, just among physicists we have:
Cambridge-connected Nobel winners in chemistry include:
In the category of Nobel Prizes for physiology or medicine, we have:
It was in 1952, in Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, that Watson and Crick made the epoch-making discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule.
Among other eminent scholars, perhaps the most influential economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, both graduated from Cambridge and taught here for many years.
Another discipline with which the University of Cambridge is intimately connected is philosophy. In fact, the characteristic style of philosophy practiced in English-speaking countries throughout the twentieth century (almost exclusively so, until fairly recently) was born in Cambridge, just after 1900, when G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, in full revolt against the then-reigning British Idealist school, and under the powerful influence of the seminal work in mathematical logic by University of Jena professor, Gottlob Frege, invented the style of philosophical writing we now call “analytical.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s arrival in Cambridge from Vienna in 1911 to study with Russell (at Frege’s suggestion) cemented this tradition, which some now refer to as “Anglo-Austrian” philosophy. While the rival “Continental” tradition (grounded in Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger) has been making inroads in British and American universities for several decades now, the analytical style, on the other hand, has an ever-increasing presence on the Continent today. As a result, Cambridge’s historical importance for the way philosophy is done in the contemporary world is now being acknowledged – and the practice itself emulated – not just in Austria, Scandinavia, and Poland (this happened earlier in the past century), but even in Germany itself, as well as in France, Italy, the rest of central and eastern Europe, and beyond.
Among other distinguished Cambridge – linked scholars, we may mention:
According to Wikipedia, The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most prestigious, currently ranked second-best in the world and the best in Europe by QS World University Rankings. Among the university's most notable alumni are 11 Fields Medalists, seven Turing Award winners, 47 heads of state, 14 British prime ministers, 194 Olympic medal-winning athletes, and some of world history's most transformational and iconic figures across disciplines, including Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, John Maynard Keynes, John Milton, Vladimir Nabokov, Jawaharlal Nehru, Isaac Newton, Bertrand Russell, Manmohan Singh, Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others. Cambridge alumni and faculty have won 121 Nobel Prizes, the most of any university in the world, according to the university.
University of Cambridge is known for it's academic work in the following disciplines:
University of Cambridge's most influential alumni include professors and professionals in the fields of Physics, Biology, and Mathematics. Here are some of University of Cambridge's most famous alumni:
University of Cambridge's most influential faculty include professors in the fields of Physics, Biology, and Mathematics. Here are some of University of Cambridge's most famous alumni: