From Newton to Hawking: A History of Cambridge University's Lucasian Professors of Mathematics

Edited by:
  • Kevin Knox &
  • Richard Noakes
Cambridge University Press: 2003. 512 pp. £27.50, $45 0521663105 | ISBN: 0-521-66310-5

For more than 300 years, Cambridge University's Lucasian professors have promoted the mathematical elaboration of nature's laws. The founder of the chair, Henry Lucas, who was awarded an honorary MA by the university in 1636 and who represented Cambridge in both the Short and the Long Parliaments, filled a gap in his university by endowing a professorship in mathematics, explicitly beyond the reach of Cambridge's influential colleges.

The Lucasian professor was to lecture for one hour each week, deposit a transcript in the library, and hold office for a further two hours. It may have been at the request of the second incumbent, Isaac Newton, that King Charles II amended the statutes to allow a professor to hold a concurrent college fellowship and to require “all undergraduates past the second year and all Bachelors of Arts up to the third year” to attend the chair's lectures. The first Lucasian professor, Isaac Barrow, vacated the chair in favour of his pupil Newton, who has cast a long shadow over his 15 successors.

The sociologist Max Weber observed that, at least for the papal succession, the second-best candidate generally wins elected office. For much of the history of the Lucasian chair, even second best would be a stretch. Talent circulated freely in eighteenth-century Europe, but the Hanoverian regents hardly gave so much as a thought to looking for a Lucasian professor at Georg-August University in Göttingen or, closer to hand, in the great intellectual reservoir of Scotland, home to subtle minds from Colin Maclaurin to the historian and mathematician Thomas Carlyle.

Foreign musicians George Frederick Handel and Joseph Haydn created extraordinary scores in England. A. W. Hofmann brought organic chemistry to London from Germany. Any one of the Bernoullis, Leonhard Euler or Carl Friedrich Gauss would have dramatically changed the course of history had the Lucasian electors been passionate about promoting mathematical talent. Not at Cambridge. The Lucasian professors have all been English or Irish Protestant — even the one foreign national, Paul Dirac, a naturalized Briton when he received the chair in 1932, was born in Bristol.

Carlyle described the eleventh Lucasian professor, Charles Babbage, as “a mixture of craven terror and venomous-looking vehemence”. Indeed, there is a quirky quality to many of the incumbents, whether they espoused apostate creeds (Arianism or spiritism) or voiced unappealing prejudices (denigration of women, contempt for labouring Britons, denial of Irish political aspirations, or flirtation with Stalinism). Certainly until the nineteenth century, Cambridge mathematicians, like much else at the university, were sexually deviant; among the early Lucasian professors, only the blind John Saunderson seems to have married. There are tantalizing suggestions about sexual orientation: Newton's avoidance of the company of women, Saunderson's enjoyment of them, John Colson's engagement of his sister as a housekeeper, and Joseph Larmor's pleasure in the college baths. Perhaps mathematical equations came to the professors as compensation for repressed libido.

The Lucasian chair is a gauge of intellectual life at Cambridge. In the century or so after Newton's tenure, the Lucasian professors were minor mathematicians and inconstant discoverers of natural law, mirroring an intellectual trough in science in England during the eighteenth century. The collective obscurity of their origins matches the extent to which Cambridge was open to all intellectually promising young men. In this time, religious scripture and orthodox dogma were a burden of the chair. Going to the university meant travelling the high road to an Establishment sinecure — a church living.

The first Industrial Revolution had an impact on the Lucasian professors, leading to Babbage's tracts on political economy and his phantom calculating machine, handsomely funded from the public purse but never constructed in his time. At the height of the second Industrial Revolution, Larmor pinned down electromagnetism. By this time, the Lucasian professors, along with an increasing proportion of undergraduates, came from relatively privileged social strata.

In their solid and engaging introduction to From Newton to Hawking, editors Kevin Knox and Richard Noakes contend that from around 1830 “the Lucasian professors played important roles in making Britain the preeminent scientific state“. But in the area where the editors' contention for eminence seems most convincing, natural history, the longest-serving chair, George Gabriel Stokes, held the great innovator Charles Darwin to be both wrong and dangerous.

Only in the later part of the twentieth century was the Lucasian chair cut free from religious orthodoxy and social convention. With the most recent professors, Dirac, M. James Lighthill and Stephen Hawking, England once again radiates enlightenment about the mathematical harmonies of the natural world.

From Newton to Hawking also speaks to enlightened scholarship in England. It contains almost no trace of postmodernist whimsy. Each of the chapters focuses on one professor or on a short sequence of them. By this organizational device, the book signals a return to conventional biography, the elegant prose making relatively little appeal to social statistics and psychology. But I found myself wanting to know more about the professors' income from the chair and other sources.

Historical taste aside, the volume is striking for both its narrative and its original research. The Lucasian chair confirms the inertia of privileged institutions: no amount of swinishness, no succession of bad choices, no penury of emoluments, no long-running infelicities in pedagogical norms, no inattention to training acolytes, and no egregious prejudices against men and women of talent can permanently injure an institution that continues to offer positions of power and prestige to its graduates. It is a story to comfort any number of vice-chancellors, provosts, deans and department heads.