A. A. Milne
Alan Alexander Milne () (18 January 1882 –31 January 1956) was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.
http://wn.com/A_A_Milne
A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman (; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early twentieth century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through its song-setting the poetry became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.
http://wn.com/A_E_Housman
A. J. Cronin
Archibald Joseph Cronin (19 July 1896–6 January 1981) was a Scottish physician and novelist. His best-known works are ''Hatter's Castle, The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom and The Green Years, all of which were adapted to film. He also created the Dr. Finlay character, the hero of a series of stories that served as the basis for the popular BBC television and radio series entitled Dr. Finlay's Casebook''.
http://wn.com/A_J_Cronin
A. S. Byatt
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE (commonly known as A. S. Byatt born 24 August 1936, Sheffield) is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her among their list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
http://wn.com/A_S_Byatt
Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Benjamin Sorkin (born June 9, 1961) is an American screenwriter, producer and playwright, whose works include A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and most recently The Social Network.
http://wn.com/Aaron_Sorkin
Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell FRSL (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British anti-authoritarian Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's anti-Bomb movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him the BritishMayakovsky.
http://wn.com/Adrian_Mitchell
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie, DBE, CBE (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976), was a British crime writer of novels, short stories and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 80 detective novels—especially those featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple—and her successful West End theatre plays.
http://wn.com/Agatha_Christie
Al Stewart
Al Stewart (born Alastair Ian Stewart, 5 September 1945) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and folk-rock musician.
http://wn.com/Al_Stewart
Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett (born 9 May 1934) is an English playwright, screenwriter and author. Born in Leeds, he attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968.
http://wn.com/Alan_Bennett
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ( ; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science and providing a formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, playing a significant role in the creation of the modern computer.
http://wn.com/Alan_Turing
Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness, CH, CBE (2 April 1914 – 5 August 2000) was an English actor. He was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. He later won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai. His most prominent role in his later career was as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy.
http://wn.com/Alec_Guinness
Alfred Marshall
Alfred Marshall (born 26 July 1842 in Bermondsey, London, England, died 13 July 1924 in Cambridge, England) was an English economist and one of the most influential economists of his time, as one of the founders of neoclassical economics. His book, Principles of Economics (1890), became the dominant economic textbook in England for a long period. It brings the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility and costs of production into a coherent whole.
http://wn.com/Alfred_Marshall
Amartya Sen
Amartya Kumar Sen, CH (, Ômorto Kumar Shen; born 3 November 1933) is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.
http://wn.com/Amartya_Sen
Anne Clough
Anne Jemima Clough (20 January 1820 – 27 February 1892) was an early English suffragist and a promoter of higher education for women.
http://wn.com/Anne_Clough
Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro, OM, CBE (born 8 March 1924 in New Malden, then in Surrey) is an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblies of metal using 'found' industrial objects.
http://wn.com/Anthony_Caro
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical conflicts of his day.
http://wn.com/Anthony_Trollope
Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley OBE RA (born 30 August 1950) is an English sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in the North of England, commissioned in 1995 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site installation which premiered in London in 2007, and in 2010 around Madison Square in New York City.
http://wn.com/Antony_Gormley
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction.
http://wn.com/Arthur_Conan_Doyle
Astronomer Royal
Astronomer Royal is a senior post in the Royal Household of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom. There are two officers, the senior being the Astronomer Royal dating from 22 June 1675; the second is the Astronomer Royal for Scotland dating from 1834.
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Augustus De Morgan
Augustus De Morgan (27 June 1806 – 18 March 1871) was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. The crater De Morgan on the Moon is named after him.
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Ben Cross
Ben Cross (born 16 December 1947) is an English actor of the stage and screen, best known for his portrayal of the British Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams in the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire.
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Ben Elton
Benjamin Charles "Ben" Elton (born 3 May 1959) is a London-born comedian, author, playwright and television director. He was a leading figure in the British alternative comedy movement of the 1980s, as a writer on such cult series as The Young Ones and Blackadder and as well as a successful stand-up comedian on stage and TV. He was a high-profile frontman of 1980s left-wing political satire. Since then he has published over twelve novels and more lately become known for writing the musical We Will Rock You (2002) and Love Never Dies (2010), the sequel to Phantom of the Opera.
http://wn.com/Ben_Elton
Ben Stiller
Benjamin Edward "Ben" Stiller (born November 30, 1965) is an American comedian, actor, writer, film director, and producer. He is the son of veteran comedians and actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.
http://wn.com/Ben_Stiller
Bertie Wooster
Bertram Wilberforce "Bertie" Wooster is a recurring fictional character in the Jeeves novels of British author P. G. Wodehouse. An English gentleman, one of the "idle rich" and a member of the Drones Club, he appears alongside his valet, Jeeves, whose genius manages to extricate Bertie or one of his friends from numerous awkward situations. As the first-person narrator of ten novels and over 30 short stories, Bertie ranks as one of the most vivid comic creations in popular literature. Bertie's middle name "Wilberforce" is the doing of his father, who won money on a horse named Wilberforce in the Grand National the day before Bertie was born and insisted on Bertie carrying that name (mentioned in Much Obliged, Jeeves).
http://wn.com/Bertie_Wooster
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, socialist, pacifist, and social critic. He spent most of his life in England; he was born in Wales where he also died, aged 97.
http://wn.com/Bertrand_Russell
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, author and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen.
http://wn.com/Bill_Gates
Bill Nighy
William Francis "Bill" Nighy (, ; born 12 December 1949) is an English actor and comedian. He worked in theatre and television before his first cinema role in 1981, and made his name in television with ''The Men's Room in 1991, in which he played the womanizer Prof. Mark Carleton, whose extra-marital affairs kept him "vital". He became known around the world in 2003 as Billy Mack, the aging pop star in Love Actually, and in the same year played James Mortmain, the eccentric husband struggling to keep his family afloat in a decaying English castle, in I Capture the Castle''.
http://wn.com/Bill_Nighy
Bishop of Ely
The Bishop of Ely is the Ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Ely in the Province of Canterbury. The diocese roughly covers the county of Cambridgeshire (with the exception of the Soke of Peterborough), together with a section of north-west Norfolk and has its see in the City of Ely, Cambridgeshire, where the seat is located at the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity. The most recent bishop was Anthony Russell, the 68th Lord Bishop of Ely, who signed +Anthony Elien:. The Bishops of Ely now reside in the Bishop's House, Ely, the former Cathedral Deanery. Dr Russell became Bishop of Ely in 2000, translated from the Diocese of Oxford, where he was Bishop of Dorchester from 1988. On 23 April 2009 he announced that he would retire on 28 February 2010. He duly retired on that date. On 31 August 2010, it was announced that the next Bishop of Ely would be Stephen Conway, the current Suffragan Bishop of Ramsbury in the Diocese of Salisbury.
http://wn.com/Bishop_of_Ely
Bob Fosse
Robert Louis “Bob” Fosse (June 23, 1927 – September 23, 1987) was an American actor, dancer, musical theater choreographer, director, screenwriter, film editor and film director. He won an unprecedented eight Tony Awards for choreography, as well as one for direction. He was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning for his direction of Cabaret. He was closely identified with his third wife, Broadway dancing star Gwen Verdon. She was both the dancer/collaborator/muse upon whom he choreographed much of his work and, together with dancer/choreographer Ann Reinking, a significant guardian of the Fosse legacy after his death.
http://wn.com/Bob_Fosse
Borat Sagdiyev
Borat Sagdiyev (Kazakh/Russian: Борат Сагдиев) (born February 17, 1972) is a fictional character from Kazakhstan and the main protagonist of the film , created and portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen.
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Brook Taylor
Sir Brook Taylor FRS (18 August 1685 – 30 November 1731) was an English mathematician who is best known for Taylor's theorem and the Taylor series.
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C. P. Snow
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City Of Leicester CBE (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980) was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important positions with the UK government.The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th Edition, 2001–2005). "[http://www.bartleby.com/65/sn/Snow-CP.html Snow, C. P.]" Accessed 26 July 2007. He is best known for his series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers, and for "The Two Cultures", a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals".
http://wn.com/C_P_Snow
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as Jack, was an Irish-born British novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist. He is also known for his fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.
http://wn.com/C_S_Lewis
Cambridge Five
The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies, recruited by Russian talent spotter Arnold Deutsch in the UK who passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and at least into the early 1950s. It has been suggested they may also have passed Soviet disinformation to the Nazis. Four members of the ring have been identified: Kim Philby (cryptonym: Stanley), Donald Duart Maclean (cryptonym: Homer), Guy Burgess (cryptonym: Hicks) and Anthony Blunt (cryptonym: Johnson); together they are known as the Cambridge Four. Several people have been suspected of being the "fifth man" but John Cairncross (cryptonym: Liszt) was identified by Oleg Gordievsky. Others have been accused of being members.
http://wn.com/Cambridge_Five
Cambridge Spies Cambridge Spies is a 2003 four-part BBC television drama concerning the lives of the Cambridge Four from 1934 to the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the Soviet Union. It was written by Peter Moffat and directed by Tim Fywell.
http://wn.com/Cambridge_Spies
Cecil Beaton
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, style icon, interior designer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.
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Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Nine years later, the Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine, an astonishingly complex device for the 19th century. Considered a "father of the computer", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs.
http://wn.com/Charles_Babbage
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The scientific community and much of the general public came to accept evolution as a fact in his lifetime, but it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed that natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.[http://darwin-online.org.uk/biography.html The Complete Works of Darwin Online - Biography.] darwin-online.org.uk. Retrieved on 2006-12-15
http://wn.com/Charles_Darwin
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was the most popular British novelist of the Victorian era, and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature's most iconic characters.
http://wn.com/Charles_Dickens
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was an English clergyman, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.
http://wn.com/Charles_Kingsley
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564–30 May 1593) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.
http://wn.com/Christopher_Marlowe
Colin Dexter
Norman Colin Dexter, OBE, (born 29 September 1930) is an English crime writer, known for his Inspector Morse novels which were written between 1975 and 1999 and adapted as a television series from 1987 to 2000.
http://wn.com/Colin_Dexter
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.
http://wn.com/D_H_Lawrence
Dan Brown
Dan Brown (born June 22, 1964) is an American author of thriller fiction, best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Brown's novels, which are treasure hunts set in a 24-hour time period, feature the recurring themes of cryptography, keys, symbols, codes, and conspiracy theories. His books have been translated into over 40 languages, and as of 2009, sold over 80 million copies.
http://wn.com/Dan_Brown
David Benedictus
David Benedictus (born September 16, 1938) is an English-Jewish writer and theatre director, best known for his novels. His most recent work is the Winnie-the-Pooh novel Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (2009). It was the first such book in 81 years.
http://wn.com/David_Benedictus
David F. Ford
David Frank Ford (born 23 January 1948) is an Anglican theologian, and the present Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, where he has taught since 1991. He is a Fellow of Selwyn College. His election to the Regius Professorship is notable, as he is the first to hold that position who is not in Anglican orders.
http://wn.com/David_F_Ford
Deng Yaping
Deng Yaping (Simplified Chinese: 邓亚萍; Traditional Chinese: 鄧亞萍; born February 5, 1973 in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China) is a Chinese table tennis player, who won six world championships and four Olympic championships between 1989 and 1997. She is regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport.
http://wn.com/Deng_Yaping
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (October 28, 1466 – July 12, 1536), sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist and a Catholic priest and theologian. His scholarly name Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus comprises the following three elements: the Latin noun ' ("longing" or "desire"; the name being a genuine Late Latin name); the Greek adjective (') meaning "desired", and, in the form Erasmus, also the name of a St. Erasmus of Formiae; and the Latinized adjectival form for the city of Rotterdam (Roterodamus = "of Rotterdam").
http://wn.com/Desiderius_Erasmus
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayers (usually pronounced , although Sayers herself preferred and encouraged the use of her middle initial to facilitate this pronunciation) (Oxford, 13 June 1893 – Witham, 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divina Commedia to be her best work. She is also known for her plays and essays.
http://wn.com/Dorothy_L_Sayers
Douglas Adams
Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English writer and dramatist. He is best known as the author of ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'', which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.
http://wn.com/Douglas_Adams
E. H. Carr
Edward Hallett "Ted" Carr CBE (28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a liberal realist and later left-wing British historian, journalist and international relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography.
http://wn.com/E_H_Carr
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".
http://wn.com/E_M_Forster
E. P. Thompson
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry.
http://wn.com/E_P_Thompson
E. R. Braithwaite
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana.
http://wn.com/E_R_Braithwaite
Eddie Redmayne
Edward John David "Eddie" Redmayne (born 6 January 1982) is an English actor and model. Redmayne won the 2010 Tony Award as best featured actor in a play for his performance in Red.
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Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English language.
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Emily Davies
:''This article is about the women's education advocate. For the pottery decorator, whose married name was Emily Grace Davies, see Grace Barnsley''
http://wn.com/Emily_Davies
Enrico Bombieri
Enrico Bombieri (born 26 November 1940 born in Milan, Italy) is a mathematician who has been working at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. Bombieri research in number theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical analysis have earned him many international prizes --- a Fields Medal in 1974 and the Balzan Prize in 1980. In 2010 he received the King Faisal International Prize (jointly with Terence Tao).
http://wn.com/Enrico_Bombieri
Eric Idle
Eric Idle (born 29 March 1943) is an English comedian, actor, author, singer, writer, and comedic composer. He wrote and performed as a member of the British comedy group Monty Python.
http://wn.com/Eric_Idle
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a British-New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".
http://wn.com/Ernest_Rutherford
Ernest Walton
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (6 October 1903 – 25 June 1995) was an Irish physicist and Nobel laureate for his work with John Cockcroft with "atom-smashing" experiments done at Cambridge University in the early 1930s. Walton is the only Irishman to have won a Nobel Prize in science.
http://wn.com/Ernest_Walton
F. R. Leavis
Frank Raymond Leavis CH (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught and studied for nearly his entire life at Downing College, Cambridge.
http://wn.com/F_R_Leavis
Footlights
Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club, commonly referred to simply as the Footlights, is an amateur theatrical club in Cambridge, England founded in 1883, run by the students of Cambridge University and Anglia Ruskin University.
http://wn.com/Footlights
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount Saint Alban, KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist and author. He famously died of pneumonia contracted while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method and pioneer in the scientific revolution.
http://wn.com/Francis_Bacon
Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004), was an English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson. He, Watson and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".
http://wn.com/Francis_Crick
Frank Whittle
Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, OM, KBE, CB, FRS, Hon FRAeS (1 June 1907 – 9 August 1996) was a British Royal Air Force (RAF) engineer officer. Sharing credit with Germany's Dr. Hans von Ohain for independently inventing the jet engine (though some years earlier than Dr. von Ohain), he is hailed as the father of jet propulsion.
http://wn.com/Frank_Whittle
Frederic Raphael
Frederic Michael Raphael (born August 14, 1931) is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist.
http://wn.com/Frederic_Raphael
Frederick Sanger
Frederick Sanger, OM, CH, CBE, FRS (born 13 August 1918) is an English biochemist and twice a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He is the fourth (and only living) person to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes.
http://wn.com/Frederick_Sanger
G. H. Hardy
Godfrey Harold “G. H.” Hardy FRS (7 February 1877 – 1 December 1947) was a prominent English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis.
http://wn.com/G_H_Hardy
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular Middle English, rather than French or Latin.
http://wn.com/Geoffrey_Chaucer
Geoffrey Trease
(Robert) Geoffrey Trease (August 11, 1909 - January 27, 1998) was a prolific writer, publishing 113 books between 1934 (Bows Against the Barons) and 1997 (Cloak for a Spy). His work has been translated into 20 languages. His grandfather was a historian, and was one of the main influences towards Trease's work.
http://wn.com/Geoffrey_Trease
George Eliot
Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and well known for their realism and psychological insight.
http://wn.com/George_Eliot
George Herbert
George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633) was a Welsh poet, orator and Anglican priest. Being born into an artistic and wealthy family, he received a good education which led to his holding prominent positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, England, George Herbert excelled in languages and music. He went to college with the intention of becoming a priest, but his scholarship attracted the attention of King James I/VI. Herbert served in parliament for two years. After the death of King James and at the urging of a friend, Herbert's interest in ordained ministry was renewed. In 1630, in his late thirties he gave up his secular ambitions and took holy orders in the Church of England, spending the rest of his life as a rector of the little parish of Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton St Andrew, near Salisbury. He was noted for unfailing care for his parishioners, bringing the sacraments to them when they were ill, and providing food and clothing for those in need.Henry Vaughan said of him"a most glorious saint and seer".Throughout his life he wrote religious poems characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favoured by the metaphysical school of poets. Charles Cotton described him as a "soul composed of harmonies". Herbert himself, in a letter to Nicholas Ferrar said of his writings, "they are a picture of spiritual conflicts between God and my soul before I could subject my will to Jesus, my Master". Some of Herbert's poems have endured as hymns, including "King of Glory, King of Peace" (Praise), "Let All the World in Every Corner Sing" (Antiphon) and "Teach me, my God and King" (The Elixir). A distant relative is the modern Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert.
http://wn.com/George_Herbert
George Mallory
George Herbert Leigh Mallory (18 June 1886 – 8/9 June 1924) was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s.
http://wn.com/George_Mallory
Georges Lemaître
Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Louvain. He sometimes used the title Abbé or Monseigneur.
http://wn.com/Georges_Lemaître
Glanville Williams
Glanville Llewelyn Williams QC, LL.D., F.B.A. (15 February 1911 – 10 April 1997) was an influential Welsh legal professor and formerly the Rouse Ball Professor of English Law at the University of Cambridge. Throughout his lifetime he also served as an Honorary and Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Honorary Bencher of Middle Temple; as well as lecturing at Cambridge he previously served as the Professor of Public Law and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at the University College London.
http://wn.com/Glanville_Williams
Graham Chapman
Graham Arthur Chapman (8 January 1941 – 4 October 1989) was an English comedian, actor, writer, physician and one of the six members of the Monty Python comedy troupe. He was also the lead actor in their two narrative films, playing King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Brian in ''Monty Python's Life of Brian. He co-authored and starred in the film Yellowbeard''.
http://wn.com/Graham_Chapman
Gregory Benford
Gregory Benford (born 30 January 1941 in Mobile, Alabama) is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.
http://wn.com/Gregory_Benford
H. Rider Haggard
Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE (22 June 1856 – 14 May 1925) was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a founder of the Lost World literary genre. He was also involved in agricultural reform around the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential.
http://wn.com/H_Rider_Haggard
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American writer and literary critic, currently Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his construction of unique but controversial theories of poetic influence, and for advocating an aesthetic approach to literature against feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, poststructuralist (deconstructive and semiotic) literary criticism. Bloom is a 1985 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
http://wn.com/Harold_Bloom
Helen Fielding
Helen Fielding (born 19 February 1958) is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, a franchise that chronicles the life of a thirtysomething single woman in London as she tries to make sense of life and love.
http://wn.com/Helen_Fielding
Henry Cavendish
Henry Cavendish FRS (10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper "On Factitious Airs". Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name. Cavendish is also known for the Cavendish experiment, his measurement of the Earth's density, and early research into electricity.
http://wn.com/Henry_Cavendish
Henry III of England
Henry III (1 October 1207 – 16 November 1272) was the son and successor of John as King of England, reigning for fifty-six years from 1216 to his death. His contemporaries knew him as Henry of Winchester. He was the first child king in England since the reign of Æthelred the Unready. England prospered during his reign and his greatest monument is Westminster, which he made the seat of his government and where he expanded the abbey as a shrine to Edward the Confessor.
http://wn.com/Henry_III_of_England
Henry James
Henry James, OM ( – ) was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
http://wn.com/Henry_James
Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick (May 31, 1838–August 28, 1900) was an English utilitarian philosopher. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence.
http://wn.com/Henry_Sidgwick
Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot (; ) is a fictional Belgian detective, created by Agatha Christie. Along with Miss Marple, Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, appearing in 33 novels and 51 short stories that were published between 1920 and 1975 and set in the same era.
http://wn.com/Hercule_Poirot
Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson (born 1942) is a British author and journalist. He is best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters.
http://wn.com/Howard_Jacobson
Hugh Laurie
James Hugh Calum Laurie, OBE (; born 11 June 1959), best known as Hugh Laurie, is an English actor, voice artist, comedian, writer, musician and director. He first reached fame as one half of the Fry and Laurie double act, along with his friend and comedy partner Stephen Fry, whom he joined in the cast of Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster from 1987 until 1999. Since 2004, he has been starring as Dr. Gregory House, the protagonist of House, for which he has received two Golden Globe awards and several Emmy nominations. As of August 2010 he is the highest paid actor in a drama series on US television.
http://wn.com/Hugh_Laurie
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 27 January 2003) was an English historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany.
http://wn.com/Hugh_Trevor-Roper
I. A. Richards
Ivor Armstrong Richards (26 February 1893 in Sandbach, Cheshire – 7 September 1979 in Cambridge) was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician.
http://wn.com/I_A_Richards
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was a British author and journalist, most famous for his novels about the British spy James Bond. Fleming chronicled Bond's adventures in twelve novels and nine short stories, a literary output that has sold over 100 million copies worldwide, making it one of the most popular series of related novels of all time. Fleming also wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two works of non-fiction.
http://wn.com/Ian_Fleming
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948) is an English novelist and screenwriter. McEwan is one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named McEwan among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
http://wn.com/Ian_McEwan
Ian Wilmut
Sir Ian Wilmut, OBE (born 7 July 1944) is an English embryologist and is currently Director of the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known as the leader of the research group that in 1996 first cloned a mammal from an adult somatic cell, a Finnish Dorset lamb named Dolly. He was granted an OBE in 1999 for services to embryo development. In December 2007 it was announced that he would be knighted in the 2008 New Year Honours.
http://wn.com/Ian_Wilmut
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch DBE (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times named Murdoch among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
http://wn.com/Iris_Murdoch
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton FRS (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 ) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is considered by many scholars and members of the general public to be one of the most influential people in human history. His 1687 publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually called the Principia) is considered to be among the most influential books in the history of science, laying the groundwork for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
http://wn.com/Isaac_Newton
J. B. Priestley
John Boynton Priestley, OM (13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984), known as J.B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 27 novels, notably The Good Companions (1929), as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls. His output included literary and social criticism.
http://wn.com/J_B_Priestley
J. G. Ballard
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction. His best-known books are Crash (1973), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film by Steven Spielberg, based on Ballard's boyhood in the International Settlement and internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War.
http://wn.com/J_G_Ballard
J. J. Thomson
Sir Joseph John "J. J." Thomson, OM, FRS (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was a British physicist and Nobel laureate. He is credited for the discovery of the electron and of isotopes, and the invention of the mass spectrometer. Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the electron and for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases.
http://wn.com/J_J_Thomson
Jack Rosenthal
Jack Morris Rosenthal CBE (8 September 1931 - 29 May 2004) was an English playwright, who wrote 129 early episodes of the ITV soap opera Coronation Street and over 150 screenplays, including original TV plays, feature films, and adaptations.
http://wn.com/Jack_Rosenthal
James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist and zoologist, best known as one of co-discoverers of the structure of DNA with Francis Crick, in 1953. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". He studied at the University of Chicago and Indiana University and subsequently worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he first met his future collaborator and personal friend Francis Crick.
http://wn.com/James_D_Watson
James Mason
James Neville Mason (15 May 1909 – 27 July 1984) was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Widely regarded as one of the finest film actors of the 20th century, Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes (winning once).
http://wn.com/James_Mason
Jane Austen
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction set among the gentry have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature. Amongst scholars and critics, Austen's realism and biting social commentary have cemented her historical importance as a writer.
http://wn.com/Jane_Austen
John Cleese
John Marwood Cleese (born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, writer and film producer. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and as a scriptwriter on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s he became a member of Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show ''Monty Python's Flying Circus and the four Monty Python films: And Now for Something Completely Different, Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life''.
http://wn.com/John_Cleese
John Cockcroft
Sir John Douglas Cockcroft OM KCB CBE (27 May 1897 – 18 September 1967) was a British physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus with Ernest Walton, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power.
http://wn.com/John_Cockcroft
John Dee
John Dee (13 July 1527–1608 or 1609) was a noted English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, navigator, imperialist, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy.
http://wn.com/John_Dee
John Donne
John Donne ( ; 21 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, preacher and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to that of his contemporaries.
http://wn.com/John_Donne
John Dryden
John Dryden (9 August 1631 – 1 May 1700) was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.
http://wn.com/John_Dryden
John G. Thompson
John Griggs Thompson (born October 13, 1932, in Ottawa, Kansas, USA) is a mathematician noted for his work in the field of finite groups. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970, the Wolf Prize in 1992 and the 2008 Abel Prize.
http://wn.com/John_G_Thompson
John Haden Badley
John Haden Badley (21 February 1865 – 6 March 1967), author, educator, and founder of Bedales School, which claims to have become the first coeducational public boarding school in England in 1893.
http://wn.com/John_Haden_Badley
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB (; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments. He greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots.
http://wn.com/John_Maynard_Keynes
John Milton
John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost.
http://wn.com/John_Milton
John Wallis
John Wallis (November 23, 1616 – October 28, 1703) was an English mathematician who is given partial credit for the development of modern calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is also credited with introducing the symbol ∞ for infinity. Asteroid 31982 Johnwallis was named after him.
http://wn.com/John_Wallis
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
http://wn.com/Jonathan_Swift
Joshua Malina
Joshua Charles Malina (born January 17, 1966) is an American film and stage actor. He is perhaps most famous for portraying Will Bailey on the NBC drama The West Wing and Jeremy Goodwin on Sports Night.
http://wn.com/Joshua_Malina
Karl Popper
Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.
http://wn.com/Karl_Popper
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE ( (Kazuo Ishiguro) or (Ishiguro Kazuo); born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese–English novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.
http://wn.com/Kazuo_Ishiguro
Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Charles Branagh (; born 10 December 1960) is a Northern Irish actor and film director. He is known for directing and starring in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays.
http://wn.com/Kenneth_Branagh
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1954 in London) is a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. He is currently the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at the Princeton University.
http://wn.com/Kwame_Anthony_Appiah
L. P. Hartley
Leslie Poles Hartley (30 December 1895 – 13 December 1972) was a British writer, known for novels and short stories. His best known work is The Go-Between (1953), which was made into a 1970 film, directed by Joseph Losey with a star cast, in an adaptation by Harold Pinter. The book's opening sentence, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", has become almost proverbial.
http://wn.com/L_P_Hartley
Lemuel Gulliver
Lemuel Gulliver is the protagonist and narrator of ''Gulliver's Travels'', a novel written by Jonathan Swift, first published in 1726.
http://wn.com/Lemuel_Gulliver
Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a political philosopher who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
http://wn.com/Leo_Strauss
Leszek Borysiewicz
Sir Leszek Krzysztof Borysiewicz MBChB PhD FRS FRCP FRCPath FMedSci FLSW (born 13 April 1951) is a Polish British physician, immunologist and scientific administrator. He is currently the 345th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, his term of office (a maximum of seven years) started on 1 October 2010. Borysiewicz was formerly chief executive of the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council.
http://wn.com/Leszek_Borysiewicz
Lise Mayer
Lise Mayer (born November 29, 1957) is a television and film writer. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States, and is best known as a creator and co-writer of the BBC comedy series The Young Ones, alongside Rik Mayall (her then partner) and Ben Elton. She met them both when they were studying drama at Manchester University, where her father, David Mayer, was their tutor.
http://wn.com/Lise_Mayer
Lone Scherfig
Lone Scherfig (born May 2, 1959) is a Danish film director. She graduated [http://www.filmskolen.dk/index.php?id=24 Danish Film School] in 1984, and began her career as a director with [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190193/ Kaj's fødselsdag] "A Birthday Trip". She made her mark with the Dogme95-film, Italian for Beginners (Italiensk for begyndere, 2000), a romantic comedy which among its many international awards won the Silver Berlin Bear (Jury Prize) at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival. It is credited as the most profitable Scandinavian film to date.
http://wn.com/Lone_Scherfig
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and ''So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan''. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.
http://wn.com/Lord_Byron
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who held the professorship of philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947.
http://wn.com/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey (; 1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His 1921 biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
http://wn.com/Lytton_Strachey
M. R. James
Montague Rhodes James, OM, MA, (1 August 1862 – 12 June 1936), who used the publication name M. R. James, was an English mediaeval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–1918) and of Eton College (1918–1936). He is best remembered for his ghost stories which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature. One of James's most important achievements was to redefine the ghost story for the new century by dispensing with many of the formal Gothic trappings of his predecessors, and replacing them with more realistic contemporary settings. At the same time, James' protagonists and plots tend—like himself—to be absorbed with antiquarianism. As such, he is known as the originator of the "antiquarian ghost story".
http://wn.com/M_R_James
Marc Quinn
Marc Quinn (born 1964) is a British artist and part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists)
http://wn.com/Marc_Quinn
Margery Allingham
Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English crime writer, best remembered for her detective stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion.
http://wn.com/Margery_Allingham
Maurice Wilkes
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes DFBCS FREng FRS (born June 26, 1913) is a British computer scientist credited with several important developments in computing.
http://wn.com/Maurice_Wilkes
Maurice Wilkins
Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins CBE FRS (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004) was a New Zealand-born English molecular biologist, and Nobel Laureate who contributed research in the fields of phosphorescence, radar, isotope separation, and X-ray diffraction. He was most widely known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA. In recognition of this work, he, Francis Crick and James Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material."
http://wn.com/Maurice_Wilkins
Michael Apted
Michael David Apted, CMG (born 10 February 1941) is an English director, producer, writer and actor. He is one of the most prolific British film directors of his generation but is best known for his work on the Up! series of documentaries and the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough.
http://wn.com/Michael_Apted
Michael Atiyah
Sir Michael Francis Atiyah, OM, FRS, FRSE (born 22 April 1929) is a British mathematician, and one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century. He grew up in Sudan and Egypt, and spent most of his academic life at Oxford, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has been President of the Royal Society (1990–1995), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1990–1997), Chancellor of the University of Leicester (1995–2005), and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2005–2008). He is currently retired and an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh.
http://wn.com/Michael_Atiyah
Michael Crichton
John Michael Crichton (rhymes with frighten; October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008), best known as Michael Crichton, was an American author, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres. His books have sold over 150 million copies worldwide, and many have been adapted into films. In 1994, Crichton became the only creative artist ever to have works simultaneously charting at #1 in television, film, and book sales (with ER, Jurassic Park, and Disclosure, respectively).
http://wn.com/Michael_Crichton
Michael Frayn
Michael J. Frayn (born 8 September 1933) is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. His works often raise philosophical questions in a humorous context. Frayn's wife is Claire Tomalin, the biographer and literary journalist.
http://wn.com/Michael_Frayn
Mick Rock
Mick Rock is a photographer best known for his iconic shots of rock and roll legends such as Queen, David Bowie, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Iggy Pop and The Stooges, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Joan Jett, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Thin Lizzy, Motley Crue, and Blondie.
http://wn.com/Mick_Rock
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, a professor at the University of Chicago, and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Among scholars, he is best known for his theoretical and empirical research, especially consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.
http://wn.com/Milton_Friedman
Nick Drake
Nicholas Rodney "Nick" Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter and musician. Best known for the sombre pieces composed on his primary instrument, the guitar, Drake was also proficient at piano, clarinet and saxophone. Although he failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, Drake's work has gradually achieved wider notice and recognition; he now ranks among the most influential English singer-songwriters of the last 50 years.
http://wn.com/Nick_Drake
Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen. He was part of a team of physicists working on the Manhattan Project. Bohr married Margrethe Nørlund in 1912, and one of their sons, Aage Bohr, grew up to be an important physicist who in 1975 also received the Nobel prize. Bohr has been described as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.
http://wn.com/Niels_Bohr
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599 – 3 September 1658) was an English military and political leader best known in England for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. Events that occurred during his reign and his politics are a cause of animosity between Ireland and the UK.
http://wn.com/Oliver_Cromwell
Olivia Williams
Olivia Haigh Williams (born 26 July 1968) is an English film, stage and television actress who has appeared in British and American films.
http://wn.com/Olivia_Williams
Orlando Gibbons
Orlando Gibbons (baptised 25 December 1583 – 5 June 1625) was an English composer, virginalist and organist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods. He was a leading composer in the England of his day.
http://wn.com/Orlando_Gibbons
P. G. Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) () was an English writer whose body of work includes novels, collections of short stories, and musical theatre. Wodehouse enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and his prolific writings continue to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of pre-war English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.
http://wn.com/P_G_Wodehouse
Patrick White
Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990), an Australian author, was widely regarded as a major English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.
http://wn.com/Patrick_White
Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS ( ; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was a British theoretical physicist. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and spent the last fourteen years of his life at Florida State University.
http://wn.com/Paul_Dirac
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd CBE (born 5 October 1949, East Acton, Middlesex) is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.
http://wn.com/Peter_Ackroyd
Philip Kerr
Philip Kerr (born 1956 in Edinburgh) is a Scottish author. He studied at the University of Birmingham and worked as an advertising copywriter for Saatchi and Saatchi before becoming a full-time writer. He has written for the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard and the New Statesman.
http://wn.com/Philip_Kerr
Piero Sraffa
Piero Sraffa (August 5, 1898 – September 3, 1983) was an influential Italian economist whose book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the Neo-Ricardian school of Economics.
http://wn.com/Piero_Sraffa
Pope John XXII
Pope John XXII (1249 – December 4, 1334), born Jacques Duèze (or '''d'Euse'''), was pope from 1316 to 1334. He was the second Pope of the Avignon Papacy (1309–1377), elected by a conclave in Lyon assembled by Philip V of France. Like his predecessor, Clement V, he centralized power and income in the Papacy, living a princely life in Avignon and funding his court and wars. He opposed Louis IV of Bavaria as emperor, and Louis in turn invaded Italy and set up an antipope, Nicholas V. Pope John XXII also faced controversy in theology involving his views on the Beatific Vision.
http://wn.com/Pope_John_XXII
Pope Nicholas IV
Pope Nicholas IV (September 30, 1227 – April 4, 1292), born Girolamo Masci, was Pope from February 22, 1288 to April 4, 1292. A Franciscan monk, he had been legate to the Greeks under Pope Gregory X (1271–76) in 1272, succeeded Bonaventure as general of his order in 1274, was made Cardinal Priest of Santa Prassede and Latin Patriarch of Constantinople by Pope Nicholas III (1277–80), Cardinal Bishop of Palestina by Pope Martin IV (1281–85), and succeeded Pope Honorius IV (1285–87) after a ten-months' vacancy in the papacy.
http://wn.com/Pope_Nicholas_IV
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1559, as an activist movement within the Church of England. The designation "Puritan" is often incorrectly used, notably based on the assumption that hedonism and puritanism are antonyms: historically, the word was used to characterize the Protestant group as extremists similar to the Cathari of France, and according to Thomas Fuller in his Church History dated back to 1564. Archbishop Matthew Parker of that time used it and "precisian" with the sense of . T. D. Bozeman therefore uses instead the term precisianist in regard to the historical groups of England and New England.
http://wn.com/Puritan
Quentin Blake
Quentin Saxby Blake, CBE, FCSD, RDI, (born 16 December 1932 in Sidcup, Kent) is an English cartoonist, illustrator and children's author, well known for his collaborations with writer Roald Dahl.
http://wn.com/Quentin_Blake
Richard Attenborough
Richard Samuel Attenborough, Baron Attenborough, CBE (born 29 August 1923) is an English actor, director, producer and entrepreneur. Attenborough has won two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globes. He is the older brother of naturalist and wildlife filmmaker Sir David Attenborough.
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Richard Borcherds
Richard Ewen Borcherds (born 29 November 1959) is a British mathematician specializing in lattices, number theory, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebras. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.
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Rik Mayall
Richard Michael "Rik" Mayall (born 7 March 1958) is an English actor, writer and comedian. He is best known for his comedy partnership with Adrian Edmondson, his over the top, energetic portrayal of characters, and for being one of the pioneering members of the alternative comedy scene in the early 1980s.
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Robert G. Edwards
Robert Geoffrey Edwards, CBE FRS (born 1925, Manchester) is a British biologist and pioneer in reproductive biology and medicine, and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in particular. Along with surgeon Patrick Steptoe (1913 1988), Edwards successfully pioneered conception through IVF, which led to the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, on 1978. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of in vitro fertilization".
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Robert Walpole
Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, KG, KB, PC (26 August 1676 – 18 March 1745), known before 1742 as Sir Robert Walpole, was a British statesman who is generally regarded as having been the first Prime Minister of Great Britain.
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Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Despite establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, as he matured as a critic he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasized the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their depicted content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".IAN CHILVERS. "Fry, Roger." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. 9 Mar. 2009 .Retrieved 9 March 2009
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Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. He was described by Anders Hald as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science," and Richard Dawkins described him as "the greatest of Darwin's successors".
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Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) was a British biophysicist, physicist, chemist, biologist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite.
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Rowan Williams
Rowan Douglas Williams FRSL, FBA (born 14 June 1950) is an Anglican bishop, poet and theologian. He is the current (104th) Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan of the Province of Canterbury and Primate of All England, offices he has held since early 2003.
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Rupert Brooke
Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as Chaucer) (3 August 1887 – 23 April 1915) was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War (especially The Soldier). He was also known for his boyish good looks, which prompted the Irish poet William Butler Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England".
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Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (lang-ur| ; born 19 June 1947) is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He achieved notability with his second novel, ''Midnight's Children'' (1981), which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western worlds.
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Sam Mendes
Samuel Alexander "Sam" Mendes, CBE (born 1 August 1965) is an English stage and film director. He has won two Laurence Olivier Awards for his London stage productions The Glass Menagerie and Company in 1996, and Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya in 2003. He also received a Tony Award nomination for Best Direction of a Musical for the Broadway revival of Cabaret in 1998. His debut film American Beauty (1999) earned him an Academy Award for Best Director.
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Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, ( "peeps") (23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament, who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man. Although Pepys had no maritime experience, he rose by patronage, hard work and his talent for administration, to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and subsequently King James II.
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Shawn Levy
Shawn Adam Levy (born 1968) is a Canadian-American director, producer and actor who directed the comedy films Big Fat Liar, Just Married, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Pink Panther, Night at the Museum, and Date Night. He has also directed many television shows, including Cousin Skeeter, The Famous Jett Jackson and Pepper Dennis.
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Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes () is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A brilliant London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his forensic science skills to solve difficult cases.
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Sid Meier
Sidney K. "Sid" Meier (born February 24, 1954) is a Canadian programmer and designer of several popular computer strategy games, who currently lives in the United States. He has won accolades for his contributions to the computer games industry. Meier is a Director of Creative Development for computer game developer Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996.
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Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston Trilogy".
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Simon Donaldson
Simon Kirwan Donaldson (born 20 August 1957, in Cambridge, England), is an English mathematician famous for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds. He is now Royal Society research professor in Pure Mathematics and President of the Institute for Mathematical Science at Imperial College London. In 2010, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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Simon McBurney
Simon Montagu McBurney, OBE (born 25 August 1957) is an English Olivier Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated actor, writer and director.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srīnivāsa Aiyangār Rāmānujan FRS, better known as Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan () (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions. Rāmānujan's talent was said, by the prominent English mathematician G.H. Hardy, to be in the same league as legendary mathematicians such as Euler, Gauss, Newton and Archimedes .
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Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, writer, journalist, comedian, television presenter, film director and a director of Norwich City Football Club. He first came to attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and the duo also played the title roles in Jeeves and Wooster.
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Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942). is an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific career spans over forty years. His books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
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Stephen Poliakoff
Stephen Poliakoff, CBE, FRSL (born 1 December 1952) is an acclaimed British playwright, director and scriptwriter, widely judged amongst Britain's foremost television dramatists.
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Susanna Gregory
Susanna Gregory is the pseudonym of Elizabeth Cruwys, a Cambridge academic who was previously a coroner's officer. She writes detective fiction, and is noted for her series of mediaeval mysteries featuring Matthew Bartholomew, a teacher of medicine and investigator of murders in 14th-century Cambridge.
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Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.
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T. H. White
Terence Hanbury White (29 May 1906 – 17 January 1964) was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.
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Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis Eagleton (born 22 February 1943, Salford) is a British literary theorist widely regarded as Britain's most influential living literary critic. Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, and as a Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
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Thandie Newton
Thandiwe Nashita "Thandie" Newton (born 6 November 1972) is an English actress. She has appeared in a number of British and American films, including The Pursuit of Happyness, Run, Fat Boy, Run, , Crash, RocknRolla, 2012, and W. http://wn.com/Thandie_Newton
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard (born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard, February 9, 1931 – February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist and playwright. He is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.
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Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. He helped build a favourable case for Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon which resulted in the separation of the English Church from union with the Holy See. Along with Thomas Cromwell, he supported the principle of Royal Supremacy, in which the king was considered sovereign over the Church within his realm.
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Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.
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Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the naturalist movement, several poems display elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.
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Tilda Swinton
Katherine Mathilda "Tilda" Swinton (born 5 November 1960) is a Scottish actress known for both arthouse and mainstream films. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Michael Clayton.
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Timothy Gowers
William Timothy Gowers FRS (born 20 November 1963, Wiltshire) is a British mathematician. He is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1998 he received the Fields Medal for his research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.
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Tom Sharpe
Tom Sharpe (Thomas Ridley Sharpe, born March 30, 1928) is an English satirical author, best known for his Wilt series of novels.
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Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL (born 3 July 1937) is an influential British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has won one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy.
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Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth (, pronounced ; born June 20, 1952) is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.
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Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
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W. Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham (pronounced , ), CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era, and reputedly, the highest paid author during the 1930s.
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W. V. D. Hodge
William Vallance Douglas Hodge FRS (17 June 1903 – 7 July 1975) was a Scottish mathematician, specifically a geometer.
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Weldon Kees
Harry Weldon Kees (February 24, 1914 - July 18, 1955) was an American poet, critic, novelist, and short story writer.
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William Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inventor and a pioneer of photography, born on February 11, 1800 and died on September 17, 1877. He was the inventor of calotype process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1840s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. Talbot is also remembered as the holder of a patent which, some say, affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. Additionally, he made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, and York.
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William Paley
William Paley (July 1743 – 25 May 1805) was a British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy (also see natural theology).
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William Tyndale
William Tyndale (sometimes spelled Tindall or Tyndall; ) (c. 1494 – 1536) was a 16th century scholar and translator who became a leading figure in Protestant reformism towards the end of his life. He was influenced by the work of Desiderius Erasmus, who made the Greek New Testament available in Europe, and Martin Luther. Tyndale was the first to translate considerable parts of the Bible into English, for a public, lay readership. While a number of partial and complete translations had been made from the seventh century onward, particularly during the 14th century, Tyndale's was the first English translation to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, and the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. This was taken to be a direct challenge to the hegemony of both the Catholic church and the English church and state. Tyndale also wrote, in 1530, The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII's divorce on the grounds that it contravened scriptural law.
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William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833) was a British politician, a philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780 and became the independent Member of Parliament for Yorkshire (1784–1812). In 1785, he underwent a conversion experience and became an evangelical Christian, resulting in major changes to his lifestyle and a lifelong concern for reform. In 1787, he came into contact with Thomas Clarkson and a group of anti-slave-trade activists, including Granville Sharp, Hannah More and Charles Middleton. They persuaded Wilberforce to take on the cause of abolition, and he soon became one of the leading English abolitionists. He headed the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade for twenty-six years until the passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807.
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William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads. http://wn.com/William_Wordsworth
Wittgenstein's Poker
'Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers' is a 2001 book by BBC journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow about events in the history of philosophy involving Sir Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, leading to a confrontation at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club in 1946. The book was a bestseller and received positive reviews.
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Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith (born 25 October 1975) is an English novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on ''Granta's'' list of 20 best young authors. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as tenured Professor from September 1, 2010
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Cambridge
The city of Cambridge ( ()) is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north-by-east of London. Cambridge is also at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the city.
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Cavendish Laboratory
The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at Cambridge University, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in 1874 as a teaching laboratory.
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Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York (Columbia University) is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. It was founded in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain, and is one of only three United States universities to have been founded under such authority.
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Durham University
The University of Durham, commonly known as Durham University, is a university in Durham, England. It was founded by Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837. It was one of the first universities to open in England for more than 600 years and has a claim towards being the third oldest university in England, although there are other institutions that also claim this distinction.
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Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system (OS) market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of OSs. The ensuing rise of stock in the company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO) made an estimated four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Microsoft would come to dominate other markets as well, notably the office suite market with Microsoft Office.
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Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, HP, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Agilent, Oracle, Yahoo, Netflix, and EA. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the American high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States and the world, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading hub for high-tech innovation and development, accounting for 1/3 of all of the venture capital investment in the United States. Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula, and the southern East Bay.
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Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university located in Stanford, California, United States. The university is located on an campus in northwestern Santa Clara Valley approximately southeast of San Francisco and approximately northwest of San Jose.
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The Backs
The Backs is an area to the east of Queen's Road in the city of Cambridge, England, where several colleges of the University of Cambridge back on to the River Cam, their grounds covering both banks of the river. The name "the Backs" refers to the backs of the colleges. The area, from Magdalene Street bridge in the north to Silver Street bridge in the south, consists of the rear grounds of the following colleges (north to south):
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Trinidad and Tobago
The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago () is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying northeast of the South American country of Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles. It shares maritime boundaries with other nations including Barbados to the northeast, Guyana to the southeast, and Venezuela to the south and west.
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UCLES
University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES) is a non-teaching department of the University of Cambridge and is a not-for-profit organisation. Cambridge Assessment is the brand name of UCLES.
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a country and sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island nation, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK with a land border with another sovereign state, sharing it with the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea. Great Britain is linked to continental Europe by the Channel Tunnel.
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Zambia
The Republic of Zambia () is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west. The capital city is Lusaka, located in the south-central part of the country. The population is concentrated mainly around the Lusaka in the south and the Copperbelt to the northwest.
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University of Cambridge is ranked (1st) best university in the world by US News & World Report. It is the second oldest university English-speaking world and the seventh oldest university globally. Affiliates of the University have won more Nobel Prizes than those of any other institution in the world with 88 Nobel Laureates. Cambridge's colleges were originally an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself. Cambridge University has research departments and teaching faculties in most academic disciplines. Over the course of its history, Cambridge University has built up a sizeable number of alumni who are notable in their fields, both academic, and in the wider world.
An endangered Greek dialect which is spoken in north-eastern Turkey has been identified by researchers as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its startling closeness to the ancient language, as Cambridge researcher Dr Ioanna Sitaridou explains.
Cambridge University glaciologist Professor Julian Dowdeswell has spent three years of his life in the polar regions. As Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, this film follows him to Greenland and the Antarctic as his research reveals the challenges we all face from climate change. credit: University of Cambridge source: www.sms.cam.ac.uk
What are engineers being trained to do these days? Is it to head the next Formula One team, or invent a dazzling new i-gadget? At the Eco-House Initiative, we hope to show that engineers could be more usefully be trained to look at producing simpler, cheaper solutions to improve the lives of the majority, not the minority. Take a peek at our video to see how we and the biggest NGO in Latin America plan to achieve this! By viewing, you are supporting us in the RBS ESSA student society competition for quite an exciting amount of funding. If you wish to support further or simply find out more, visit www.justgiving.com or www.eng.cam.ac.uk ¿Para qué están capacitados los ingenieros de hoy en día? ¿Para estar a la cabeza de la Formula 1, o para inventar nuevos i-Gadget? En Eco-House Iniciative, esperamos dar a conocer que estos ingenieros puedan ser útiles y estar preparados para conseguir soluciones más prácticas y económicas, mejorando la vida de la mayoría y no de la minoría. Echa un vistazo a nuestro video para comprobar como nosotros y las mayores ONG en Latino América lo consiguen. Al verlo, nos estas apoyando en el concurso de la sociedad estudiantil RBS ESSA para poder obtener gran parte de la financiación de nuestro proyecto. Si desea apoyarnos u obtener más información visita: www.justgiving.com o www.eng.cam.ac.uk
Brian Blessed talks about his upbringing, and why he wants to be chancellor of the University of Cambridge. The election for chancellor is 14th and 15th October 2011. For more details about the campaign and voting arrangements, go to www.brianforchancellor.com
Find out more: www.CambridgeESOL.org This video provides a brief overview to the University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations' (Cambridge ESOL) question paper production process.
Ha-Joon Chang, Reader at the University of Cambridge, discusses criticisms of microfinance in tackling poverty. This event, Microfinance in the time of neoliberalism was held on the 5th July 2010, from 17.30-19.00, at ODI's offices in London.
After a week of running and playing in London, we drove to the village of Sawston, in Cambridgeshire, to visit a friend. We stayed there for four days and took a number of sightseeing trips, the first of which was a visit to Cambridge. As a university professor, I was eager to prowl around the University of Cambridge, one of the oldest universities in the world and home of the world-renowned King's College, Cavendish Laboratory, and the Cambridge University Library. It was founded in 1209 by students who fled from hostile townspeople in Oxford.
May 16, 1999 www.amazon.com Watch the full speech: thefilmarchived.blogspot.com In the spring of 1969, Chomsky delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, and many others. Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following: * University of London * University of Chicago * Loyola University of Chicago * Swarthmore College * University of Delhi * Bard College * University of Massachusetts * University of Pennsylvania * Georgetown University * Amherst College * University of Cambridge * University of Buenos Aires * McGill University * Universitat Rovira i Virgili * Columbia University * Villanova University * University of Connecticut * University of Maine * Scuola Normale Superiore * University of Western Ontario * University of Toronto * Harvard University * Universidad de Chile * University of Bologna * Universidad de la Frontera * University of Calcutta * Universidad Nacional de Colombia * Vrije Universiteit Brussel * Santo Domingo Institute of Technology * Uppsala University * University of Athens * University of Cyprus * Central <b>...</b>
Studio Cambridge is an English Language School founded in 1954. We are the oldest and largest English Language School in Cambridge, England. Cambridge is home to the world-famous University of Cambridge and has an excellent reputation for academic excellence. Our main school is located in two Victorian Villas, close to the railway station and within walking distance of the beautiful historic city centre of Cambridge. We also run 7 Language and Activity Programmes for younger learners during the summer, based in excellent schools and universities in various locations in England. Studio Cambridge runs English classes for thousands of students from all over the world each year. This video was created during summer 2009 and features many of our students.
www.wikisuniversity.com provides the procedure of Admission Interviews in Cambridge University Official Video. How to apply to university of Cambridge complete detailed video of information.
In this video we see a killer T cell of the immune system attacking a cancer cell. Cambridge University's Under the Microscope is a collection of videos that show glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up. They are released every Monday and Thursday for the next few weeks and you can see them here: bit.ly Professor Gillian Griffiths: "Cells of the immune system protect the body against pathogens. If cells in our bodies are infected by viruses, or become cancerous, then killer cells of the immune system identify and destroy the affected cells. Cytotoxic T cells are very precise and efficient killers. They are able to destroy infected or cancerous cells, without destroying healthy cells surrounding them. The Wellcome Trust funded laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, investigates just how this is accomplished. By understanding how this works, we can develop ways to control killer cells. This will allow us to find ways to improve cancer therapies, and ameliorate autoimmune diseases caused when killer cells run amok and attack healthy cells in our bodies." Cytotoxic T cells are just 10 microns in length: approximately one-tenth the width of a human hair. These movies are 92 times real time. The original footage shown was made by Alex Ritter, a PhD student on the NIH-OxCam programme, in the laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the Department of <b>...</b>
Disclaimer: I do not own this. "Abide with Me" is a Christian hymn written by Scottish Anglican Henry Francis Lyte. He wrote it in 1847 while he lay dying from tuberculosis; he survived only a further three weeks after its completion. 1. Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me. 2. Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; earth's joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changest not, abide with me. 3. I need thy presence every passing hour. What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power? Who, like thyself, my guide and stay can be? Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me. 4. I fear no foe, with thee at hand to bless; ills have no weight, and tears not bitterness. Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory? I triumph still, if thou abide with me. 5. Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; shine through the gloom and point me to the skies. Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee; in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
Can computers understand emotions? Can computers express emotions? Can they feel emotions? The latest video from the University of Cambridge shows how emotions can be used to improve interaction between humans and computers.
The Cambridge Footlights Revue or "The Cellar Tapes" (1982) is a televised version of the revue show originally performed in 1981 by the Footlights - a group of comic writers-performers at the University of Cambridge. It is performed by Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer. --- Part 1/5 --- Enjoy!
Former Cambridge students, Jacqui and Mark, present an overview of the University of Cambridge and the College system, with information on choosing a course and College, the application process and student life in Cambridge.
University of Cambridge is ranked (1st) best university in the world by US News & World Report. It is the second oldest university English-speaking world and the seventh oldest university globally. Affiliates of the University have won more Nobel Prizes than those of any other institution in the world with 88 Nobel Laureates. Cambridge's colleges were originally an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself. Cambridge University has research departments and teaching faculties in most academic disciplines. Over the course of its history, Cambridge University has built up a sizeable number of alumni who are notable in their fields, both academic, and in the wider world.
2:50
Archaic Greek in a modern world
Archaic Greek in a modern world
An endangered Greek dialect which is spoken in north-eastern Turkey has been identified by researchers as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its startling closeness to the ancient language, as Cambridge researcher Dr Ioanna Sitaridou explains.
6:40
University of Cambridge: This Icy World
University of Cambridge: This Icy World
Cambridge University glaciologist Professor Julian Dowdeswell has spent three years of his life in the polar regions. As Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, this film follows him to Greenland and the Antarctic as his research reveals the challenges we all face from climate change. credit: University of Cambridge source: www.sms.cam.ac.uk
137:26
A. Kochergin (А. Кочергин) at the University of Cambridge (part1)
A. Kochergin (А. Кочергин) at the University of Cambridge (part1)
Here you can read about my impressions after the meeting: vkovaliov.livejournal.com
5:07
O Holy Night : Kings College, Cambridge
O Holy Night : Kings College, Cambridge
The choir of Kings College, Cambridge sing John Rutter's arrangement of Adolphe Adam's wonderful carol O Holy Night during Carols From Kings 2009.
3:38
Kings College Cambridge 2008 #9 God rest ye Merry, Gentlemen arr David Willcocks
Kings College Cambridge 2008 #9 God rest ye Merry, Gentlemen arr David Willcocks
spiritdei.blogspot.com King's College Cambridge 2008 God rest ye Merry, Gentlemen arr David Willcocks
3:12
Silent Night : Kings College, Cambridge
Silent Night : Kings College, Cambridge
The choir of Kings College, Cambridge sing Stephen Cloebury's arrangement of the wonderful carol Silent Night during Carols From Kings 2009.
3:51
University of Cambridge Eco-House Initiative
University of Cambridge Eco-House Initiative
What are engineers being trained to do these days? Is it to head the next Formula One team, or invent a dazzling new i-gadget? At the Eco-House Initiative, we hope to show that engineers could be more usefully be trained to look at producing simpler, cheaper solutions to improve the lives of the majority, not the minority. Take a peek at our video to see how we and the biggest NGO in Latin America plan to achieve this! By viewing, you are supporting us in the RBS ESSA student society competition for quite an exciting amount of funding. If you wish to support further or simply find out more, visit www.justgiving.com or www.eng.cam.ac.uk ¿Para qué están capacitados los ingenieros de hoy en día? ¿Para estar a la cabeza de la Formula 1, o para inventar nuevos i-Gadget? En Eco-House Iniciative, esperamos dar a conocer que estos ingenieros puedan ser útiles y estar preparados para conseguir soluciones más prácticas y económicas, mejorando la vida de la mayoría y no de la minoría. Echa un vistazo a nuestro video para comprobar como nosotros y las mayores ONG en Latino América lo consiguen. Al verlo, nos estas apoyando en el concurso de la sociedad estudiantil RBS ESSA para poder obtener gran parte de la financiación de nuestro proyecto. Si desea apoyarnos u obtener más información visita: www.justgiving.com o www.eng.cam.ac.uk
5:05
Brian Blessed - Why I want to be Chancellor of the University of Cambridge
Brian Blessed - Why I want to be Chancellor of the University of Cambridge
Brian Blessed talks about his upbringing, and why he wants to be chancellor of the University of Cambridge. The election for chancellor is 14th and 15th October 2011. For more details about the campaign and voting arrangements, go to www.brianforchancellor.com
4:12
How we produce Cambridge English exams
How we produce Cambridge English exams
Find out more: www.CambridgeESOL.org This video provides a brief overview to the University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations' (Cambridge ESOL) question paper production process.
10:18
Ha-Joon Chang - Cambridge University
Ha-Joon Chang - Cambridge University
Ha-Joon Chang, Reader at the University of Cambridge, discusses criticisms of microfinance in tackling poverty. This event, Microfinance in the time of neoliberalism was held on the 5th July 2010, from 17.30-19.00, at ODI's offices in London.
6:05
England - Cambridge
England - Cambridge
After a week of running and playing in London, we drove to the village of Sawston, in Cambridgeshire, to visit a friend. We stayed there for four days and took a number of sightseeing trips, the first of which was a visit to Cambridge. As a university professor, I was eager to prowl around the University of Cambridge, one of the oldest universities in the world and home of the world-renowned King's College, Cavendish Laboratory, and the Cambridge University Library. It was founded in 1209 by students who fled from hostile townspeople in Oxford.
10:49
Noam Chomsky: University of Connecticut Commencement Speech - Part 1 (1999)
Noam Chomsky: University of Connecticut Commencement Speech - Part 1 (1999)
May 16, 1999 www.amazon.com Watch the full speech: thefilmarchived.blogspot.com In the spring of 1969, Chomsky delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, and many others. Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following: * University of London * University of Chicago * Loyola University of Chicago * Swarthmore College * University of Delhi * Bard College * University of Massachusetts * University of Pennsylvania * Georgetown University * Amherst College * University of Cambridge * University of Buenos Aires * McGill University * Universitat Rovira i Virgili * Columbia University * Villanova University * University of Connecticut * University of Maine * Scuola Normale Superiore * University of Western Ontario * University of Toronto * Harvard University * Universidad de Chile * University of Bologna * Universidad de la Frontera * University of Calcutta * Universidad Nacional de Colombia * Vrije Universiteit Brussel * Santo Domingo Institute of Technology * Uppsala University * University of Athens * University of Cyprus * Central <b>...</b>
4:04
Studio Cambridge - Official Video
Studio Cambridge - Official Video
Studio Cambridge is an English Language School founded in 1954. We are the oldest and largest English Language School in Cambridge, England. Cambridge is home to the world-famous University of Cambridge and has an excellent reputation for academic excellence. Our main school is located in two Victorian Villas, close to the railway station and within walking distance of the beautiful historic city centre of Cambridge. We also run 7 Language and Activity Programmes for younger learners during the summer, based in excellent schools and universities in various locations in England. Studio Cambridge runs English classes for thousands of students from all over the world each year. This video was created during summer 2009 and features many of our students.
9:47
Procedure of Admission Interviews in Cambridge University Official Video 01
Procedure of Admission Interviews in Cambridge University Official Video 01
www.wikisuniversity.com provides the procedure of Admission Interviews in Cambridge University Official Video. How to apply to university of Cambridge complete detailed video of information.
1:02
Under the Microscope #6
Under the Microscope #6
In this video we see a killer T cell of the immune system attacking a cancer cell. Cambridge University's Under the Microscope is a collection of videos that show glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up. They are released every Monday and Thursday for the next few weeks and you can see them here: bit.ly Professor Gillian Griffiths: "Cells of the immune system protect the body against pathogens. If cells in our bodies are infected by viruses, or become cancerous, then killer cells of the immune system identify and destroy the affected cells. Cytotoxic T cells are very precise and efficient killers. They are able to destroy infected or cancerous cells, without destroying healthy cells surrounding them. The Wellcome Trust funded laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, investigates just how this is accomplished. By understanding how this works, we can develop ways to control killer cells. This will allow us to find ways to improve cancer therapies, and ameliorate autoimmune diseases caused when killer cells run amok and attack healthy cells in our bodies." Cytotoxic T cells are just 10 microns in length: approximately one-tenth the width of a human hair. These movies are 92 times real time. The original footage shown was made by Alex Ritter, a PhD student on the NIH-OxCam programme, in the laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the Department of <b>...</b>
4:53
Abide With Me (King's College Choir, Cambridge)
Abide With Me (King's College Choir, Cambridge)
Disclaimer: I do not own this. "Abide with Me" is a Christian hymn written by Scottish Anglican Henry Francis Lyte. He wrote it in 1847 while he lay dying from tuberculosis; he survived only a further three weeks after its completion. 1. Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me. 2. Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; earth's joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changest not, abide with me. 3. I need thy presence every passing hour. What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power? Who, like thyself, my guide and stay can be? Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me. 4. I fear no foe, with thee at hand to bless; ills have no weight, and tears not bitterness. Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory? I triumph still, if thou abide with me. 5. Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; shine through the gloom and point me to the skies. Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee; in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
3:10
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - In dulci jubilo (Carols from King 2001)
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - In dulci jubilo (Carols from King 2001)
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - In dulci jubilo (Carols from King 2001)
3:40
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - God rest you merry gentlemen (Carols from King 2001)
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - God rest you merry gentlemen (Carols from King 2001)
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - God rest you merry gentlemen (Carols from King 2001)
6:33
Cambridge Ideas - The Emotional Computer
Cambridge Ideas - The Emotional Computer
Can computers understand emotions? Can computers express emotions? Can they feel emotions? The latest video from the University of Cambridge shows how emotions can be used to improve interaction between humans and computers.
9:06
Cambridge Footlights Revue 1/5
Cambridge Footlights Revue 1/5
The Cambridge Footlights Revue or "The Cellar Tapes" (1982) is a televised version of the revue show originally performed in 1981 by the Footlights - a group of comic writers-performers at the University of Cambridge. It is performed by Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer. --- Part 1/5 --- Enjoy!
25:10
Cambridge Explained
Cambridge Explained
Former Cambridge students, Jacqui and Mark, present an overview of the University of Cambridge and the College system, with information on choosing a course and College, the application process and student life in Cambridge.
The Daily MailThe world of equestrian competition is renowned for the tensions and rivalries that simmer beneath the sport’s graceful façade. But when teams from Oxford and Cambridge met for their annual clash, it ended in an unseemly spat, amid accusations of ungentlemanly conduct. The bitter dispute began...(size: 8.4Kb)
The Daily TelegraphCambridge University is so desperate to avoid upsetting foreign students that it has cautioned its academics against automatically shaking their hands in case it causes offence. Expert advice on cultural relations suggests that most people around the world have no objection to the handshake although...(size: 14.1Kb)
The Daily MailBritain's brightest minds are less switched on when it comes to sex, according to a study. Of the 309 students surveyed at Cambridge University half admitted to having unprotected sex. While the same number said they believed there was no risk of pregnancy when a women is menstruating and ten...(size: 6.8Kb)
The University of Cambridge (informally Cambridge University, or simply Cambridge) is a publicresearch university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world, and the seventh-oldest globally. In post-nominals the university's name is abbreviated as ''Cantab'', a shortened form of ''Cantabrigiensis'' (an adjective derived from ''Cantabrigia'', the Latinised form of ''Cambridge'').
The university grew out of an association of scholars in the city of Cambridge that was formed in 1209, early records suggest, by scholars leaving Oxford after a dispute with townsfolk. The two "ancient universities" have many common features and are often jointly referred to as ''Oxbridge''. In addition to cultural and practical associations as a historic part of British society, they have a long history of rivalry with each other.
Graduates of the University have won a total of 61 Nobel Prizes, the most of any university in the world. Affiliates of the University have won a total of 88 Nobel Prizes as of 4 October 2010, the second most of any academic institution (after Columbia University)—the most recent one being Robert G. Edwards for the prize in physiology or medicine. Academic staff of the University won a total of 52 Nobel Prizes, second most of any academic institution (after Columbia University). In 2009, the marketing consultancy World Brand Lab rated Cambridge University as the 50th most influential brand in the world, and the 4th most influential university brand, behind only Harvard, MIT and Stanford University, while in 2011, the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings ranked Cambridge as the 3rd most reputable university in the world, after Harvard and MIT.
Cambridge's status was enhanced by a charter in 1231 from King Henry III of England which awarded the ''ius non trahi extra'' (a right to discipline its own members) plus some exemption from taxes, and a bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX that gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach everywhere in Christendom.
Cambridge's colleges were originally an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself. The colleges were endowed fellowships of scholars. There were also institutions without endowments, called hostels. The hostels were gradually absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, but they have left some indicators of their time, such as the name of Garret Hostel Lane.
Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse in 1284, Cambridge's first college. Many colleges were founded during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but colleges continued to be established throughout the centuries to modern times, although there was a gap of 204 years between the founding of Sidney Sussex in 1596 and Downing in 1800. The most recently established college is Robinson, built in the late 1970s. However, Homerton College only achieved full university college status in March 2010, making it the newest full college (it was previously an "Approved Society" affiliated with the university).
In medieval times, many colleges were founded so that their members would pray for the souls of the founders, and were often associated with chapels or abbeys. A change in the colleges’ focus occurred in 1536 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. King Henry VIII ordered the university to disband its Faculty of Canon Law and to stop teaching "scholastic philosophy". In response, colleges changed their curricula away from canon law and towards the classics, the Bible, and mathematics.
As Cambridge moved away from Canon Law so too did it move away from Catholicism. As early as the 1520s, the continental rumblings of Lutheranism and what was to become more broadly known as the Protestant Reformation were making their presence felt in the intellectual discourse of the university. Among the intellectuals involved was the theologically influential Thomas Cranmer, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury. As it became convenient to Henry VIII in the 1530s, the King looked to Cranmer and others (within and without Cambridge) to craft a new religious path that was different from Catholicism yet also different from what Martin Luther had in mind.
Nearly a century later, the university was at the centre of another Christian schism. Many nobles, intellectuals and even common folk saw the ways of the Church of England as being all too similar to the Catholic Church and moreover that it was used by the crown to usurp the rightful powers of the counties. East Anglia was the centre of what became the Puritan movement and at Cambridge, it was particularly strong at Emmanuel, St Catharine's Hall, Sidney Sussex and Christ's College. They produced many "non-conformist" graduates who greatly influenced, by social position or pulpit, the approximately 20,000 Puritans who left for New England and especially the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Migration decade of the 1630s. Oliver Cromwell, Parliamentary commander during the English Civil War and head of the English Commonwealth (1649–1660), attended Sidney Sussex.
Mathematics
From the time of Isaac Newton in the later 17th century until the mid-19th century, the university maintained a strong emphasis on applied mathematics, particularly mathematical physics. Study of this subject was compulsory for graduation, and students were required to take an exam for the Bachelor of Arts degree, the main first degree at Cambridge in both arts and science subjects. This exam is known as a Tripos. Students awarded first-class honours after completing the mathematics Tripos were named wranglers. The Cambridge Mathematical Tripos was competitive and helped produce some of the most famous names in British science, including James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and Lord Rayleigh. However, some famous students, such as G. H. Hardy, disliked the system, feeling that people were too interested in accumulating marks in exams and not interested in the subject itself.
Pure mathematics at Cambridge in the 19th century had great achievements but also missed out on substantial developments in French and German mathematics. Pure mathematical research at Cambridge finally reached the highest international standard in the early 20th century, thanks above all to G. H. Hardy and his collaborator, J. E. Littlewood. In geometry, W. V. D. Hodge brought Cambridge into the international mainstream in the 1930s.
Although diversified in its research and teaching interests, Cambridge today maintains its strength in mathematics. Cambridge alumni have won six Fields Medals and one Abel Prize for mathematics, while individuals representing Cambridge have won four Fields Medals. The University also runs a special
Master of Advanced Study course in mathematics.
Contributions to the advancement of science
Many of the most important scientific discoveries and revolutions were made by Cambridge alumni. These include:
Initially, only male students were enrolled into the university. The first colleges for women were Girton College (founded by Emily Davies) in 1869 and Newnham College in 1872 (founded by Anne Clough and Henry Sidgwick), followed by Hughes Hall in 1885 (founded by Elizabeth Phillips Hughes as the Cambridge Teaching College for Women), New Hall (later renamed Murray Edwards College) in 1954, and Lucy Cavendish College. The first women students were examined in 1882 but attempts to make women full members of the university did not succeed until 1947. Women were allowed to study courses, sit examinations, and have their results recorded from 1881; for a brief period after the turn of the twentieth century, this allowed the "steamboat ladies" to receive ''ad eundem'' degrees from the University of Dublin.
From 1921 women were awarded diplomas which "conferred the Title of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts". As they were not "admitted to the Degree of Bachelor of Arts" they were excluded from the governing of the university. Since students must belong to a college, and since established colleges remained closed to women, women found admissions restricted to colleges established only for women. Starting with Churchill College, all of the men's colleges began to admit women between 1972 and 1988. One women's college, Girton, also began to admit male students from 1979, but the other women's colleges did not follow suit. As a result of St Hilda's College, Oxford, ending its ban on male students in 2008, Cambridge is now the only remaining United Kingdom University with colleges which refuse to admit males, with three such institutions (Newnham, Murray Edwards and Lucy Cavendish). In the academic year 2004–5, the university's student gender ratio, including post-graduates, was male 52%: female 48%.
Myths, legends and traditions
As an institution with such a long history, the University has developed a large number of myths and legends. The vast majority of these are untrue, but have been propagated nonetheless by generations of students and tour guides.
A discontinued tradition is that of the wooden spoon, the ‘prize’ awarded to the student with the lowest passing grade in the final examinations of the Mathematical Tripos. The last of these spoons was awarded in 1909 to Cuthbert Lempriere Holthouse, an oarsman of the Lady Margaret Boat Club of St John's College. It was over one metre in length and had an oar blade for a handle. It can now be seen outside the Senior Combination Room of St John's. Since 1909, results were published alphabetically within class rather than score order. This made it harder to ascertain who the winner of the spoon was (unless there was only one person in the third class), and so the practice was abandoned.
Each Christmas Eve, BBC radio and television broadcasts The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge. The radio broadcast has been a national Christmas tradition since it was first transmitted in 1928 (though the festival has existed since 1918). The radio broadcast is carried worldwide by the BBC World Service and is also syndicated to hundreds of radio stations in the USA. The first television broadcast of the festival was in 1954.
Organisation
Cambridge is a collegiate university, meaning that it is made up of self-governing and independent colleges, each with its own property and income. Most colleges bring together academics and students from a broad range of disciplines, and within each faculty, school or department within the university, academics from many different colleges will be found.
The faculties are responsible for ensuring that lectures are given, arranging seminars, performing research and determining the syllabi for teaching, overseen by the General Board. Together with the central administration headed by the Vice-Chancellor, they make up the entire Cambridge University. Facilities such as libraries are provided on all these levels: by the University (the Cambridge University Library), by the departments (departmental libraries such as the Squire Law Library), and by the individual colleges (all of which maintain a multi-discipline library, generally aimed mainly at their undergraduates).
Colleges
The colleges are self-governing institutions with their own endowments and property, founded as integral parts of the university. All students and most academics are attached to a college. Their importance lies in the housing, welfare, social functions, and undergraduate teaching they provide. All faculties, departments, research centres, and laboratories belong to the university, which arranges lectures and awards degrees, but undergraduates receive their supervisions—small-group teaching sessions, often with just one student—within the colleges. Each college appoints its own teaching staff and fellows, who are also members of a university department. The colleges also decide which undergraduates to admit to the university, in accordance with university regulations.
Cambridge has 31 colleges, of which three, Murray Edwards, Newnham and Lucy Cavendish, admit women only. The other colleges are mixed, though most were originally all-male. Darwin was the first college to admit both men and women, while Churchill, Clare, and King's were the first previously all-male colleges to admit female undergraduates, in 1972. In 1988 Magdalene became the last all-male college to accept women. Clare Hall and Darwin admit only postgraduates, and Hughes Hall, Lucy Cavendish, St Edmund's and Wolfson admit only mature (i.e. 21 years or older on date of matriculation) students, including graduate students. All other colleges admit both undergraduate and postgraduate students with no age restrictions.
Colleges are not required to admit students in all subjects, with some colleges choosing not to offer subjects such as architecture, history of art or theology, but most offer close to the complete range. Some colleges maintain a bias towards certain subjects, for example with Churchill leaning towards the sciences and engineering, while others such as St Catharine's aim for a balanced intake. Costs to students (accommodation and food prices) vary considerably from college to college. Others maintain much more informal reputations, such as for the students of King's College to hold left-wing political views, or Robinson College and Churchill College's attempts to minimise its environmental impact.
The principal method of teaching at Cambridge colleges is the supervision. These are typically weekly hour-long sessions in which small groups of students—usually between one and three—meet with a member of the university's teaching staff or a doctoral student. Students are normally required to complete an essay or assignment in advance of the supervision, which they will discuss with the supervisor during the session, along with any concerns or difficulties they have had with the material presented in that week's lectures. Lectures at Cambridge are often described as being almost a mere 'bolt-on' to these supervisions. Typically, students receive between one and four supervisions per week. However the number of supervisions varies according to subject and college, and it can often be the case that a student may receive more supervisions in one college than a student reading the same subject in another college. This pedagogical system is often cited as being unique to Cambridge and Oxford (where "supervisions" are known as "tutorials")
The concept of grading students' work quantitatively was developed by a tutor named William Farish at the University of Cambridge in 1792.
Schools, faculties and departments
In addition to the 31 colleges, the university is made up of over 150 departments, faculties, schools, syndicates and other institutions. Members of these are usually also members of one or more of the colleges and responsibility for running the entire academic programme of the university is divided amongst them.
A "School" in the University of Cambridge is a broad administrative grouping of related faculties and other units. Each has an elected supervisory body—the "Council" of the school—comprising representatives of the constituent bodies. There are six schools:
Arts and Humanities
Biological Sciences
Clinical Medicine
Humanities and Social Sciences
Physical Sciences
Technology
Teaching and research in Cambridge is organised by faculties. The faculties have different organisational sub-structures which partly reflect their history and partly their operational needs, which may include a number of departments and other institutions. In addition, a small number of bodies entitled 'Syndicates' have responsibilities for teaching and research, e.g. Cambridge Assessment, the University Press, and the University Library.
Academic year
The academic year is divided into three academic term, determined by the Statutes of the University. Michaelmas Term lasts from October to December; Lent Term from January to March; and Easter Term from April to June.
Within these terms undergraduate teaching takes place within eight-week periods called Full Terms. These terms are shorter than those of many other British universities. Undergraduates are also expected to prepare heavily in the three holidays (known as the Christmas, Easter and Long Vacations).
Central administration
Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor
The office of Chancellor of the University, for which there are no term limits, is mainly ceremonial and is currently vacant, following the retirement of the Duke of Edinburgh on his 90th birthday in June, 2011. David Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury of Turville was nominated by the official Nomination Board to succeed him, and Abdul Arain, owner of a local grocery store, Brian Blessed and Michael Mansfield were also nominated. The election will take place in October 2011.
The current Vice-Chancellor is Leszek Borysiewicz. While the Chancellor's office is ceremonial, the Vice-Chancellor is the ''de facto'' principal administrative officer of the University. The university's internal governance is carried out almost entirely by its own members, with very little external representation on its governing body, the Regent House (though there is external representation on the Audit Committee, and there are four external members on the University's Council, who are the only external members of the Regent House).
Senate and the Regent House
The Senate consists of all holders of the MA degree or higher degrees. It elects the Chancellor and the High Steward, and elected two members of the House of Commons until the Cambridge University constituency was abolished in 1950. Prior to 1926, it was the University's governing body, fulfilling the functions that the Regent House fulfils today. The Regent House is the University's governing body, a direct democracy comprising all resident senior members of the University and the Colleges, together with the Chancellor, the High Steward, the Deputy High Steward, and the Commissary. The public representatives of the Regent House are the two Proctors, elected to serve for one year, on the nomination of the Colleges.
Council and the General Board
Although the University Council is the principal executive and policy-making body of the University, therefore, it must report and be accountable to the Regent House through a variety of checks and balances. It has the right of reporting to the University, and is obliged to advise the Regent House on matters of general concern to the University. It does both of these by causing notices to be published by authority in the ''Cambridge University Reporter'', the official journal of the University. Since January 2005, the membership of the Council has included two external members, and the Regent House voted for an increase from two to four in the number of external members in March 2008, and this was approved by Her Majesty the Queen in July 2008.
The General Board of the Faculties is responsible for the academic and educational policy of the University, and is accountable to the Council for its management of these affairs.
Faculty Boards are responsible to the General Board; other Boards and Syndicates are responsible either to the General Board (if primarily for academic purposes) or to the Council. In this way, the various arms of the University are kept under the supervision of the central administration, and thus the Regent House.
Finances
In late 2006, the total financial endowment of the university and the colleges was estimated at £4.1 billion (US$8.2 billion): £1.2 billion tied directly to the university, £2.9 billion to the colleges. Oxford (including its colleges) is possibly ranked second, having reported an endowment valued at £3.9bn in mid-2006. The university's operating budget is £600 million per year.
Each college is an independent charitable institution with its own endowment, separate from that of the central university endowment.
If ranked on a US university endowment table using figures reported in 2006, Cambridge would rank sixth or seventh (depending on whether one includes the University of Texas System—which incorporates nine full scale universities and six health institutions), or fourth in a ranking compared with only the eight Ivy League institutions.
Comparisons between Cambridge's endowment and those of other top US universities are, however, inaccurate because being a state-funded public university, Cambridge receives a major portion of its income through education and research grants from the British Government. In 2006, it was reported that approximately one third of Cambridge's income comes from UK government funding for teaching and research, with another third coming from other research grants. Endowment income contributes around 6%.
In 2005, the Cambridge 800th Anniversary Campaign was launched, aimed at raising £1 billion by 2012—the first US-style university fund-raising campaign in Europe. £940 million of funds have been secured to date.
Collections
Libraries and museums
The university has more than 100 libraries. The Cambridge University Library is the central research library, which holds over 8 million volumes and, in contrast with the Bodleian or the British Library, many of its books are available on open shelves. It is a legal deposit library, therefore it is entitled to request a free copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland. It receives around 80,000 books every year. In addition to the University Library and its dependent libraries, every faculty has a specialised library, which, on average, holds from 30,000 to 150,000 books; for example the History Faculty's Seeley Historical Library posess more than 100.000 books. Also, every college has a library as well, partially for the purposes of undergraduate teaching, and the older colleges often possess many early books and manuscripts in a separate library. For example Trinity College's Wren Library, Cambridge has more than 200,000 books printed before 1800, while the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College posess one of the greatest early medieval European manuscript collections in the World, with over 600 manuscripts. The total number of books owned by the university is about 13 million.
Cambridge University operates eight arts, cultural, and scientific museums, and a botanic garden:
Cambridge University has research departments and teaching faculties in most academic disciplines. All research and lectures are conducted by University Departments. The colleges are in charge of giving or arranging most supervisions, student accommodation, and funding most extracurricular activities. During the 1990s Cambridge added a substantial number of new specialist research laboratories on several University sites around the city, and major expansion continues on a number of sites.
Building on its reputation for enterprise, science and technology, Cambridge has a partnership with MIT in the United States, the Cambridge–MIT Institute.
Admissions
Procedure
The application system to Cambridge and Oxford involves additional requirements, with candidates typically called to face-to-face interviews.
How applicants perform in the interview process is an important factor in determining which students are accepted. Most applicants are expected to be predicted at least three A-grade A-level qualifications relevant to their chosen undergraduate course, or equivalent overseas qualifications. The A* A-level grade (introduced in 2010) now plays a part in the acceptance of applications. Due to a very high proportion of applicants receiving the highest school grades, the interview process is crucial for distinguishing between the most able candidates. In 2006, 5,228 students who were rejected went on to get 3 A levels or more at grade A, representing about 63% of all applicants rejected. The interview is performed by College Fellows, who evaluate candidates on unexamined factors such as potential for original thinking and creativity. For exceptional candidates, a ''Matriculation Offer'' is sometimes offered, requiring only two A-levels at grade E or above—Christ's College is unusual in making this offer to about one-third of successful candidates, in order to relieve very able candidates of some pressure in their final year.
Applicants who are not successful at their college interview may be placed in the Winter Pool which is a process where strong applicants can be offered places by other colleges.
Graduate admission is first decided by the faculty or department relating to the applicant's subject. This effectively guarantees admission to a college—though not necessarily the applicant's preferred choice.
Access
Public debate in the United Kingdom continues over whether admissions processes at Oxford and Cambridge are entirely merit based and fair; whether enough students from state schools are encouraged to apply to Cambridge; and whether these students succeed in gaining entry. In 2007–08, 57% of all successful applicants were from state schools (roughly 93 percent of all students in the UK attend state schools). However, the average qualifications for successful applicants from state schools are slightly lower than the average qualification of successful applicants from private schools. Critics have argued that the lack of state school applicants with the required grades applying to Cambridge and Oxford has had a negative impact on Oxbridge's reputation for many years, and the University has encouraged pupils from state schools to apply for Cambridge to help redress the imbalance. Others counter that government pressure to increase state school admissions constitutes inappropriate social engineering. The proportion of undergraduates drawn from independent schools has dropped over the years, and such applicants now form only a significant minority (43%) of the intake. In 2005, 32% of the 3599 applicants from independent schools were admitted to Cambridge, as opposed to 24% of the 6674 applications from state schools. In 2008 the University of Cambridge received a gift of £4m to improve its accessibility to candidates from maintained schools. Cambridge, together with Oxford and Durham, is among those universities that have adopted formulae that gives a rating to the GCSE performance of every school in the country to "weight" the scores of university applicants.
Both the University's central Student Union, and individual college student unions (JCRs) run student led Access schemes aimed at encouraging applications to the University from students at schools with little or no history of Oxbridge applications, and from students from families with little or no history of participation in university education.
Reputation
In the last two British Government Research Assessment Exercise in 2001 and 2008 respectively, Cambridge was ranked first in the country. In 2005, it was reported that Cambridge produces more PhDs per year than any other British university (over 30% more than second placed Oxford). In 2006, a Thomson Scientific study showed that Cambridge has the highest research paper output of any British university, and is also the top research producer (as assessed by total paper citation count) in 10 out of 21 major British research fields analysed. Another study published the same year by Evidence showed that Cambridge won a larger proportion (6.6%) of total British research grants and contracts than any other university (coming first in three out of four broad discipline fields).
The university is also closely linked with the development of the high-tech business cluster in and around Cambridge, which forms the area known as Silicon Fen or sometimes the "Cambridge Phenomenon". In 2004, it was reported that Silicon Fen was the second largest venture capital market in the world, after Silicon Valley. Estimates reported in February 2006 suggest that there were about 250 active startup companies directly linked with the university, worth around US$6 billion.
Times Good University Guide (UK) !! Guardian University Guide (UK) !! Sunday Times University Guide (UK) !! [[The Independent">Independent Complete University Guide (UK) !! Daily Telegraph (UK)
In the 2008 Sunday Times University Guide, Cambridge was ranked first for the 11th straight year since the guide's first publication in 1998. In the 2008 Times Good University Guide, Cambridge topped 37 of the guide's 61 subject tables, including Law, Medicine, Economics, Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry and has the best record on research, entry standards and graduate destinations amongst UK universities. Cambridge was also awarded the University of the Year award.
In the 2009 The Times Good University Guide Subject Rankings, Cambridge was ranked top (or joint top) in 34 out of the 42 subjects which it offers. The overall ranking placed Cambridge in 2nd behind Oxford. The 2009 Guardian University Guide Rankings also placed Cambridge 2nd in the UK behind Oxford.
In the Guardian newspaper's 2012 rankings, Cambridge pulled ahead of Oxford to secure 1st place in the league table. Cambridge had overtaken Oxford in philosophy, law, politics, theology, maths, classics, anthropology and modern languages in the Guardian subject rankings.
Publishing
The University's publishing arm, the Cambridge University Press, is the oldest printer and publisher in the world.
Public examinations
The university set up its Local Examination Syndicate in 1858. Today, the syndicate, which is known as Cambridge Assessment, is Europe's largest assessment agency and it plays a leading role in researching, developing and delivering assessments across the globe.
Graduation
At the University of Cambridge, each graduation is a separate act of the university's governing body, the Regent House, and must be voted on as with any other act. A formal meeting of the Regent House, known as a ''Congregation'', is held for this purpose.
Graduates receiving an undergraduate degree wear the academical dress that they were entitled to before graduating: for example, most students becoming Bachelors of Arts wear undergraduate gowns and not BA gowns. Graduates receiving a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD or Master's) wear the academical dress that they were entitled to before graduating, only if their first degree was also from the University of Cambridge; if their first degree is from another university, they wear the academical dress of the degree that they are about to receive, the BA gown without the strings if they are under 24 years of age, or the MA gown without strings if they are 24 and over.
Graduands are presented in the Senate House college by college, in order of foundation or recognition by the university (except for the royal colleges), as follows.
|
align="right" valign="top"
1.
valign="top"
King's College ||
8.
Trinity Hall
16.
Sidney Sussex College
24.
Darwin College
align="right" valign="top"
2.
valign="top"
Trinity College ||
9.
Corpus Christi College
17.
Downing College
25.
Wolfson College
align="right" valign="top"
3.
valign="top"
St John's College ||
10.
Queens' College
18.
Girton College
26.
Clare Hall
|
11.
St Catharine's College
19.
Newnham College
27.
Robinson College
align="right" valign="top"
4.
valign="top"
Peterhouse ||
12.
Jesus College
20.
Selwyn College
28.
Lucy Cavendish College
align="right" valign="top"
5.
valign="top"
Clare College ||
13.
Christ's College
21.
Fitzwilliam College
29.
St Edmund's College
align="right" valign="top"
6.
valign="top"
Pembroke College ||
14.
Magdalene College
22.
Churchill College
30.
Hughes Hall
align="right" valign="top"
7.
valign="top"
Gonville & Caius College ||
15.
Emmanuel College
23.
New Hall
31.
Homerton College
During the congregation, graduands are brought forth by the Praelector of their college, who takes them by the right hand, and presents them to the vice-chancellor for the degree they are about to take. The Praelector presents male graduands with the following Latin statement, substituting "____" with the name of the degree:
:"Dignissima domina, Domina Procancellaria et tota Academia praesento vobis hunc virum quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina esse idoneum ad gradum assequendum _____; idque tibi fide mea praesto totique Academiae.
:(Most worthy Vice-Chancellor and the whole University, I present to you this man whom I know to be suitable as much by character as by learning to proceed to the degree of ____; for which I pledge my faith to you and to the whole University.)"
and female graduands with the following:
:"Dignissima domina, Domina Procancellaria et tota Academia praesento vobis hanc mulierem quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina esse idoneam ad gradum assequendum ____; idque tibi fide mea praesto totique Academiae.
:(Most worthy Vice-Chancellor and the whole University, I present to you this woman whom I know to be suitable as much by character as by learning to proceed to the degree of ____; for which I pledge my faith to you and to the whole University.)"
After presentation, the graduand is called by name and kneels before the vice-chancellor and proffers their hands to the vice-chancellor, who clasps them and then confers the degree through the following Latin statement—the ''Trinitarian formula'' (in italics) may be omitted at the request of the graduand:
:"Auctoritate mihi commissa admitto te ad gradum ____'', in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti''.
:(By the authority committed to me, I admit you to the degree of ____'', in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit''.)"
The now-graduate then rises, bows and leaves the Senate House through the Doctor's door, where he or she receives his or her certificate, into Senate House passage.
Student life
Sports
Cambridge maintains a long tradition of student participation in sport and recreation. Rowing is a particularly popular sport at Cambridge, and there are competitions between colleges, notably the bumps races, and against Oxford, the Boat Race. There are also Varsity matches against Oxford in many other sports, ranging from cricket and rugby, to chess and tiddlywinks. Athletes representing the university in certain sports entitle them to apply for a Cambridge Blue at the discretion of the ''Blues Committee'', consisting of the captains of the thirteen most prestigious sports. There is also the self-described "unashamedly elite" Hawks’ Club, which is for men only, whose membership is usually restricted to Cambridge Full Blues and Half Blues.
Student organisations
The Cambridge University Student Union is the overall Student Union organisation. However, the Cambridge Union serves as a focus for debating. Drama societies notably include the Amateur Dramatic Club (ADC) and the comedy club Footlights, which are known for producing well-known show-business personalities. Student newspapers include the long-established ''Varsity'' and its younger rival, ''The Cambridge Student.'' In the last year, both have been challenged by the emergence of ''The Tab'', Cambridge's first student tabloid. The student-run radio station, Cam FM, provides members with an opportunity to produce and host weekly radio shows and promotes broadcast journalism, sports coverage, comedy and drama.
The Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra explores a range of programmes, from popular symphonies to lesser known works. Membership of the orchestra is composed of students of the university and it has also attracted a variety of conductors and soloists, including Wayne Marshall, Jane Glover, and Nicholas Cleobury. Cambridge is also home to a number of recreational outdoor societies, such as the Cambridge University Punting Society.
Notable alumni and academics
Over the course of its history, Cambridge University has 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 85 and 88 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.
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.
Another Cambridge scholar responsible for major developments in scientific understanding was Charles Darwin, the biologist who first suggested the theory natural selection. 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 crystallographer 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 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, as a means for scientists to avoid interrupting their research and going all the way down to the laboratory dining room only to be disappointed by an empty coffee pot.
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 Chinese 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.
At least 25 foreign Heads of Government, including the current Prime Ministers of India, Singapore and Jordan, and the current Presidents of Zambia and Trinidad and Tobago.
At least 9 monarchs and a large number of other royals.
In ''The Reeve's Tale'' from ''The Canterbury Tales'' by Geoffrey Chaucer, the two main characters are students at Soler Halle. It is believed that this refers to King's Hall, which is now part of Trinity College.
''In Memoriam A.H.H.'' (1849 poem) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is a requiem written in memory of the poet's Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The poem features numerous references to their time together at Trinity College, "the reverend walls in which of old I wore the gown".
In ''Doctor Thorne'' (1858 novel) by Anthony Trollope, Frank Gresham, heir to the near-bankrupt Gresham estate, is a Cambridge student. Despite his family's objections, he is determined to return to the University and study for a degree.
In ''A Tale of Two Cities'' (1859 novel) by Charles Dickens, Charles Darnay tutors Cambridge undergraduates in French language and literature.
In ''Middlemarch'' (1872 novel) by George Eliot, Mr Brooke, the heroine's uncle and guardian, is a Cambridge graduate. He claims to have been a student at the same time as Wordsworth.
''John Caldigate'' (1879 novel) by Anthony Trollope is set partly at the University and in the nearby village of Chesterton.
In ''All Sorts and Conditions of Men'' (1882 Novel) by Sir Walter Besant, Cambridge is an important setting.
In ''Portraits of Places'' (1883 travel book), Henry James describes the college backs as "the loveliest confusion of gothic windows and ancient trees, of grassy banks and mossy balustrades, of sun‐chequered avenues and groves, of lawns and gardens and terraces, of single arched bridges spanning the little stream, which … looks as if it had been ‘turned on’ for ornamental purposes."
In the ''Sherlock Holmes'' series (1887–1927 collection of novels and short stories) by Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes reveals that he first developed his methods of deduction while an undergraduate. The author Dorothy L. Sayers suggests that, given details in two of the Adventures, Holmes must have been at Cambridge rather than Oxford and that "of all the Cambridge colleges, Sidney Sussex [College] perhaps offered the greatest number of advantages to a man in Holmes’ position and, in default of more exact information, we may tentatively place him there".
In ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'' (1891 novel) by Thomas Hardy, Angel Clare rebels against his family's plans to have him sent to Cambridge and ordained as a minister of the Church of England. His older brothers are both Cambridge graduates and Cuthbert is the dean of a Cambridge college.
In ''Utopia, Limited'' (1892 opera) by Gilbert and Sullivan, the entrance of the character Princess Zara, who is returning from her studies at Girton College, is heralded by a song called "Oh, maiden rich in Girton lore". In the earlier Gilbert and Sullivan opera ''Princess Ida'' (1884), the princess founds a women's university and the subject of women's education in the Victorian era is broadly explored and parodied.
In ''The Turn of the Screw'' (1898 novella) by Henry James, the story's narrator, Douglas, describes first meeting the protagonist after coming down from Trinity College for the second summer of his university career.
In the ''Psmith'' series (1908–1923 collection of novels) by P. G. Wodehouse, both the title character and Mike, his closest friend, study at Cambridge University.
In ''Women in Love'' (1920 novel) by D. H. Lawrence, the character Joshua is introduced at the dinner table as a Cambridge don. Over the course of the meal he explains, in accordance with the idiosyncratic stereotype, how "education is like gymnastics".
In ''A Passage to India'' (1924 novel) by E. M. Forster, the Indian Hamidullah refers to his time at Cambridge to support his argument that it is easier to befriend Englishmen in England than in India.
In ''The Waves'' (1931 novel) by Virginia Woolf, the characters Bernard and Neville are both graduates of Cambridge University.
''Darkness at Pemberley'' (1932 novel) by T. H. White features St Bernard's College, a fictionalised version of Queens' College.
''Glory'' (1932 novel) by Vladimir Nabokov is the story of an émigré student who escapes from Russia and is educated at Cambridge before returning to his native country.
In ''Sweet Danger'' (1933 novel) by Margery Allingham, a mini-biography reveals the famous sleuth Albert Campion to be a graduate of the fictional St Ignatius' College, Cambridge.
In ''The Citadel'' (1937 Novel) by A. J. Cronin, the protagonist's initial rival and close friend, Philip Denny, is a Cambridge graduate. Dr Hope, another of the protagonist's main associates, spends much of his time at Cambridge where he is completing a medical degree.
In ''Lions and Shadows'' (1938 autobiography), Christopher Isherwood writes extensively about his time at the university.
In ''The Facts of Life'' (1939 Short Story) by W. Somerset Maugham, the main character Nicky attends Peterhouse due to its reputation in Lawn Tennis.
''The Caterpillar and the Men from Cambridge'' (1943 poem) by Weldon Kees, is a satirical response to the teachings of Cambridge literary critics I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden.
''The Hills of Varna'' (1948 novel) by Geoffrey Trease begins with main character Alan Drayton being sent down from his Cambridge college after it emerges that he was involved in a tavern brawl. His Cambridge tutor, Erasmus, sends him to the continent to try to retrieve a manuscript of The Gadfly, a lost play by the ancient Greek writer Alexis from the time of Socrates.
''The Masters'' (1951 novel) and ''The Affair'' (1960 Novel) by C. P. Snow, both feature an unnamed fictional college, partly based on the author's own, Christ's.
''Facial Justice'' by L. P. Hartley (1960 novel) is set in a dystopian Cambridge sometime after the Third World War: "Cambridge - for so the settlement was named - was built on the supposed site of the famous University town, not a vestige of which remained."
In ''You Only Live Twice'' (1964 novel) by Ian Fleming, the famous spy James Bond is revealed to have graduated from Cambridge University with a First in Oriental Languages; in the film adaptation of ''The Spy Who Loved Me'' (1977), Bond is again identified as a Cambridge graduate.
''The Millstone'' (1965 Novel) by Margaret Drabble is the story of a young female Cambridge academic who becomes pregnant and is forced into a completely alien life style.
On ''Bed-Sitter Images'' (1967 album), Al Stewart's debut release, the final track, ''Beleeka Doodle Day'', opens with the line "I could have gone to Cambridge with Lionel" and goes on to express a number of the singer's other regrets.
''The House on the Strand'' (1969 novel) by Daphne du Maurier is the story of two Cambridge graduates who have created a drug that enables time travel. They frequently refer to their college days.
In many novels and plays by Thomas Bernhard (written between 1970 and 2006), Cambridge (''Geistesnest'') is the refuge of a ''Geistesmensch'' escaping from Austria.
''Maurice'' (1971 novel) by E. M. Forster is about the homosexual relationship of two Cambridge undergraduates.
''Cabaret'' (1972 film) by Bob Fosse is based on the works of Christopher Isherwood who attended Corpus Christi College. As a result, the university is referenced in the movie.
''The Glittering Prizes'' (1976 TV drama) and ''Oxbridge Blues'' (1984 TV Drama) by Frederic Raphael both feature Cambridge University.
In ''Professional Foul'' (1977 Play) by Tom Stoppard, the main character, Anderson, is Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University.
''Timescape'' (1980 novel) by Gregory Benford is the story of a group of scientists at the University of Cambridge and their attempts to warn the past about a series of global disasters that have left the world in a state of disarray. Benford's short story, ''Anomalies'', is also set at Cambridge, where the main character, an amateur astronomer from Ely, meets the Master of Jesus College.
The unaired ''Doctor Who'' episode "Shada" (1980) shows the Fourth Doctor and his companion Romana in the fictional St. Cedd's College, which was filmed in Front Court, Emmanuel College. Footage of the pair punting by the backs from this episode was re-used in the twentieth anniversary episode, ''The Five Doctors'' (1983).
''On the Beach at Cambridge'' (1984 poem) by Adrian Mitchell is written from the point of view of someone sitting on a beach and looking out to sea, where the remnants of Cambridge University, as represented by the trademark spires and towers of the colleges, may just about be seen above the water. The poem was written to draw attention to the dangers of climate change and rising sea levels.
In ''Bambi'' (1984), the first episode of the second series of ''The Young Ones'', written by Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer, the four main characters represent Scumbag College on University Challenge. The opposing team is Footlights College, Oxbridge, which consisted of Lord Monty (Hugh Laurie); Lord Snot (Stephen Fry, who had himself appeared on University Challenge while a student at Cambridge); Miss Money-Sterling (Emma Thompson); and Kendal Mintcake (Ben Elton). Three of the four Oxbridge contestants were played by actual Cambridge graduates who had been Footlights members during their time at the University.
''Floating Down to Camelot'' (1985 novel) by David Benedictus is set entirely at Cambridge University and was inspired by the author's time at Churchill College.
''Still Life'' (1985 novel) by A. S. Byatt features Cambridge University.
In ''Redback'' (1986 novel), Howard Jacobson creates the fictional Malapert College, drawing on his experiences at Downing College and Selwyn College.
''The Matthew Bartholomew Chronicles'' (1990s Novels) by Susanna Gregory, is a series of murder mysteries set in and around the university in medieval Cambridge.
''The Gate of Angels'' (1990 novel) by Penelope Fitzgerald is about a young Cambridge University physicist who falls in love with a nurse after a bicycle accident. The novel is set in 1912, at a time when Cambridge was at the heart of a revolution in Physics.
''Civilization'' (1991 Video Game) by Sid Meier features 'Isaac Newton's College' as a Wonder of the World. This could be a reference to Cambridge University as a whole or to Trinity College specifically. However, the video accompanying the wonder in ''Civilization II'' (1996) erroneously shows the University of Oxford.
''Air and Angels'' (1991 novel) by Susan Hill is largely set at Cambridge, where the Revd Thomas Cavendish, a university don, falls in love with Kitty, a young Indian girl.
''For the Sake of Elena'' (1992 novel) by Elizabeth George features a fictional Cambridge college called St Stephen's.
In ''Fever Pitch'' (1992 sports biography), Nick Hornby refers to his time at Jesus College, Cambridge.
In ''A Philosophical Investigation'' (1992 novel) by Philip Kerr, the government call on Cambridge's Professor of Philosophy to talk 'Wittgenstein', a murderous virtual being, into committing suicide.
In ''A Suitable Boy'' (1993 novel) by Vikram Seth, one of Lata's would-be suitors, a fellow college student, dreams of attending Cambridge University.
Jill Paton Walsh is the author of four detective stories featuring Imogen Quy, the nurse at St. Agatha's, a fictional Cambridge college: ''The Wyndham Case'' (1993), ''A Piece of Justice'' (1995), ''Debts of Dishonour'' (2006) and ''The Bad Quarto'' (2007).
In ''Bridget Jones's Diary'' (1996 novel) by Helen Fielding, Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy, who compete for Bridget's affection, are revealed to have been best friends at Cambridge.
''Eskimo Day'' (1996 TV Drama), written by Jack Rosenthal, and starring Maureen Lipman, Tom Wilkinson, and Alec Guinness, is about the relationship between parents and teenagers during an admissions interview day at Queens’ College. There was also a sequel, ''Cold Enough for Snow'' (1997).
Sacha Baron Cohen's character Borat explores Cambridge University in his ''Guide to Britain'' (2000 TV series).
In ''When We Were Orphans'' (2000 novel) by Kazuo Ishiguro, the protagonist, Detective Christopher Banks, begins his narrative immediately after graduating from Cambridge.
In ''Atonement'' (2001 Novel) by Ian McEwan, the characters Cecilia and Robbie arrive home from Cambridge at the start of the novel.
''Cambridge Spies'' (2003 TV Drama) is about the famous Cambridge Five double agents who started their careers at Cambridge: Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt.
In the ''Maisie Dobbs'' mystery series (2003-2010 collection of novels) by Jacqueline Winspear the heroine is a former student of Girton College, having attended before and after World War I.
''The History Boys'' (2004 play) by Alan Bennett, focuses on students in the north of England preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams as used until the mid-1980s.
In ''Night at the Museum'' (2006 film), directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ben Stiller and Robin Williams, the Egyptian pharaoh Ahkmenrah claims to speak perfect English as a result of his time in a display cabinet at Cambridge University.
In ''That Mitchell and Webb Look'' (2006–2010 TV series) a recurring sketch features an absurd gameshow known as Numberwang which professes to originate from Cambridge University's "Department of Numbers".
In ''Lewis'' (2006–2011 TV series), inspired by the novels of Colin Dexter, the Detective Sergeant James Hathaway is a Cambridge graduate.
''A Disappearing Number'' (2007 play) by Simon McBurney is about a famous collaboration between two very different Cambridge scholars: Srinivasa Ramanujan, a poor, self-taught Brahmin from southern India, and G. H. Hardy, an upper-class Englishman and world-renowned Professor of Mathematics.
''The Indian Clerk'' (2007 novel) by David Leavitt is an account of the career of the self-taught mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, as seen mainly through the eyes of his mentor and collaborator G. H. Hardy, a British mathematics professor at Cambridge University.
''Engleby'' (2007 novel) by Sebastian Faulks is largely set at a fictionalised version of Cambridge University. From the description of the protagonist's college in the opening chapter, one can tentatively suggest that he attends Emmanuel College, of which Faulks is an alumnus.
''The Dongle of Donald Trefusis'' (2009 audiobook) by Stephen Fry is a 12-part series in which Fry, as himself, receives an inheritance from his (fictional) former Cambridge tutor, Donald Trefusis, who has recently died. The inheritance includes a USB drive (or "dongle") which contains messages from Trefusis to Fry from beyond the grave.
''Page Eight'' (2011 film) by David Hare is partly set at Cambridge, where the Director General of MI5 (played by Michael Gambon), his colleague and closest friend (Bill Nighy) and the Prime Minister (Ralph Fiennes) were all at college together. Although the college is not named, it is Jesus College that was used for filming.
Garrett, Martin (2004), 'Cambridge: a Cultural and Literary History', Signal Books. ISBN 1-902669-79-7
''A history of the University of Cambridge'', by Christopher N.L. Brooke, Cambridge University Press, 4 volumes, 1988–2004, ISBN 0-521-32882-9, ISBN 0-521-35059-X, ISBN 0-521-35060-3, ISBN 0-521-34350-X
, by Noboru Koyama, translated by Ian Ruxton, This book includes information about the wooden spoon and the university in the 19th century as well as the Japanese students.
City of Cambridge
| other_name
| nickname
| settlement_type Non-metropolitan district, City
| motto
| image_skyline KingsCollegeChapelWest.jpg
| imagesize 280px
| image_caption King's College Chapel, seen from The Backs
| image_blank_emblem Arms-cambridge.jpg
| blank_emblem_type Coat of Arms of the City Council
| blank_emblem_size 150px
| blank_emblem_link Cambridge City Council, England
| image_map Cambridge UK locator map.svg
| mapsize 200px
| map_caption Cambridge shown within Cambridgeshire
| coordinates_region GB
| subdivision_type Sovereign state
| subdivision_name United Kingdom
| subdivision_type1 Constituent country
| subdivision_name1 England
| subdivision_type2 Region
| subdivision_name2 East of England
| subdivision_type3 Ceremonial county
| subdivision_name3 Cambridgeshire
| subdivision_type4 Admin HQ
| subdivision_name4 Cambridge City Centre
| government_footnotes
| government_type Non-metropolitan district, City
| leader_title Governing body
| leader_name Cambridge City Council
| leader_title1 Mayor
| leader_name1 Ian Nimmo-Smith
| leader_title2 MPs:
| leader_name2 Julian Huppert(LD)Andrew Lansley(C)
| established_title Founded
| established_date 1st century
| established_title2 City status
| established_date2 1951
| area_total_km2 115.65
| area_land_km2
| population_as_of
| population_total (Ranked )
| population_urban 130000 (est.)(Cambridge Urban Area)
| population_blank1_title County
| population_blank1 752900
| population_blank2_title Ethnicity
| population_blank2 73.8% White British1.3% White Irish9.8% White Other2.2% Mixed Race5.5% British Asian5.1% Chinese and other2.3% Black British
| timezone Greenwich Mean Time
| utc_offset +0
| timezone_DST BST
| utc_offset_DST +1
| latd 52 |latm 12 |lats 29 |latNS N
| longd 0 |longm 7 |longs 21 |longEW E
| elevation_m 6
| postal_code_type Postcode
| postal_code CB1 – CB5
| area_code 01223
| blank1_name ONS code
| blank1_info 12UB
| blank2_name OS grid reference
| blank2_info
| website www.cambridge.gov.uk
}}
According to the United Kingdom Census 2001, the city's population was 108,863 (including 22,153 students), and the population of the urban area (which includes parts of the neighbouring South Cambridgeshire district) is estimated to be 130,000.
History
Prehistory
Settlements have existed around the Cambridge area since before the Roman Empire. The earliest clear evidence of occupation is the remains of a 3,500-year-old farmstead discovered at the site of Fitzwilliam College. There is further archaeological evidence through the Iron Age, a Belgic tribe having settled on Castle Hill in the 1st century BC.
Roman times
The first major development of the area began with the Roman invasion of Britain in about AD 40. Castle Hill made Cambridge a useful place for a military outpost from which to defend the River Cam. It was also the crossing point for the Via Devana which linked Colchester in Essex with the garrisons at Lincoln and the north. This Roman settlement has been identified as ''Duroliponte''.
The settlement remained a regional centre during the 350 years after the Roman occupation, until about AD 400. Roman roads and walled enclosures can still be seen in the area.
Duroliponte means bridge over the ''duro'' or ''duroli'', which appears to derive from the celtic word for water.
Saxon and Viking age
After the Romans had left Saxons took over the land on and around Castle Hill and renamed it ''Grantabrycge'' – 'Bridge over Granta'. Their grave goods have been found in the area. During Anglo-Saxon times Cambridge benefited from good trade links across the hard-to-travel fenlands. By the 7th century the town was less significant, described by Bede as a "little ruined city" containing the burial site of Etheldreda. Cambridge is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as "Grantebrycge", a period when settlements existed on both sides of the river and Cambridge was on the border of East Anglian and Middle Anglian kingdoms.
The arrival of the Vikings in Cambridge was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 875. Viking rule, the Danelaw, had been imposed by 878 The Vikings' vigorous trading habits caused Cambridge to grow rapidly. During this period the centre of the town shifted from Castle Hill on the left bank of the river to the area now known as the Quayside on the right bank. After the Viking period the Saxons enjoyed a brief return to power, building St Bene't's Church in 1025, which still stands in Bene't Street.
Norman times
In 1068, two years after his conquest of England, William of Normandy built a castle on Castle Hill. Like the rest of the newly conquered kingdom, Cambridge fell under the control of the King and his deputies. The distinctive Round Church dates from this period. By Norman times the name of the town had mutated to Grentabrige or Cantebrigge (Grantbridge), while the river that flowed through it was called the Granta.
Over time the name of the town changed to Cambridge, while the river Cam was still known as the Granta – the Upper River between the Millpond in Cambridge and Grantchester is still known as the Granta to this day. It was only later that the river became known as the Cam, by analogy with the name Cambridge. The University, formed 1209, uses a Latin adjective ''cantabrigiensis'' (often contracted to "Cantab") to mean "of Cambridge", though this is a back-formation from the English name.
Beginnings of the university
In 1209, students escaping from hostile townspeople in Oxford fled to Cambridge and formed a university there. The oldest college that still exists, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284. One of the most well-known buildings in Cambridge, King's College Chapel, was begun in 1446 by King Henry VI. The project was completed in 1515 during the reign of King Henry VIII.
From the 1930s to the 1980s the size of the city was greatly increased by several large council estates planned to hold London overspill. The biggest impact has been on the area north of the river, which are now the estates of Arbury, East Chesterton and King's Hedges, and there are many smaller estates to the south of the city.
During World War II Cambridge served as an evacuation centre for over 7,000 people from London, as well as for parts of the University of London. The town became a military centre, with an R.A.F. training centre and the regional headquarters for Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire, and Bedfordshire established during the conflict.
In 1962 Cambridge's first shopping arcade, Bradwell's Court, opened on Drummer Street, though this was demolished in 2006. Other shopping arcades followed at Lion Yard, which housed a relocated Central Library for the city, and the Grafton Centre which replaced Victorian housing stock which had fallen into disrepair in the Kite area of the city. Both of these projects met strong opposition at the time.
The city gained its second University in 1992 when Anglia Polytechnic became Anglia Polytechnic University. Renamed Anglia Ruskin University in 2005, the institution has its origins in the Cambridge School of Art opened in 1858 by John Ruskin. The Open University also has a presence in the city, with an office operating on Hills Road.
Despite having a university, Cambridge was not granted its city charter until 1951. Cambridge does not have a cathedral, traditionally a prerequisite for city status, instead falling within the Church of England Diocese of Ely. Many of the buildings in the centre are colleges affiliated to the University of Cambridge, including King's College and Magdalene College. Colleges such as Trinity College and St John's College own significant land both in Cambridge and outside: Trinity is the landlord for the Cambridge Science Park, and also the port of Felixstowe; St John's is the landlord of St John's Innovation Centre near to the Science Park, and many other buildings in the city centre.
Cambridge City Council plans to renew the area around the Corn Exchange concert hall, and plans for a permanent ice-skating rink are being considered after the success of a temporary one that has been on Parker's Piece every year for the past few years.
New housing and developments have continued through the 21st century, with estates such as the CB1 and Accordia schemes near the station, and developments such as Clayfarm and Trumpington Meadows planned for the south of the city.
Governance
Local government
Cambridge is a non-metropolitan district served by Cambridge City Council. The City of Cambridge is one of five districts within the county of Cambridgeshire, and is bordered on all sides by the mainly rural South Cambridgeshire district. Indeed, it is the only district in England to be entirely surrounded by another. The city council's headquarters are in the Guildhall, a large building in the market square. City councillors elect a mayor annually. Cambridge was granted a Royal Charter by King John in 1207, which permitted the appointment of a Mayor, although the first recorded Mayor, Harvey FitzEustace, served in 1213. Cambridge is also served by Cambridgeshire County Council.
Cambridge is about north-by-east of London. The city is located in an area of level and relatively low-lying terrain just south of the Fens, which varies between and above sea level. The River Cam flows through the city north from the village of Grantchester. The name 'Cambridge' is derived from the river.
Like most cities, modern-day Cambridge has many suburbs and areas of high-density housing. The city centre of Cambridge is mostly commercial, historic buildings, and large green areas such as Jesus Green, Parker's Piece and Midsummer Common. Many of the roads in the centre are pedestrianised.
Climate
Cambridge currently has two official weather observing stations, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), about 2 miles north of the city centre, and the Botanical Gardens, about 1 mile south of the city centre. The city, like most of the UK, has a maritime climate highly influenced by the gulf stream. This is moderated to some extent by its low lying, inland, and easterly position within the British Isles, meaning summer temperatures in particular tend to be somewhat higher than areas further west, and often rival or even exceed those recorded in the London area. July 2006 for example recorded the highest official mean monthly maximum (i.e. averaged over the entire month) of any month at any location in the UK since records began; ,at both the NIAB and Botanical Gardens observing stations – Cambridge also often records the annual highest national temperature in any given year – in July 2008 at NIAB and in August 2007 at the Botanical Gardens are two recent examples.
The absolute maximum stands at set on the 10 August 2003, although a temperature of was recorded on the same day at the Guildhall rooftop weather station in the city centre and is acknowledged by the Met Office. Before this, the absolute maximum was set at the Botanical Gardens in August 1990. The last time the temperature exceeded was July 2006 when the maximum reached at the Botanical Gardens and at NIAB. Typically the temperature will reach or higher on 20.5 days of the year over the 1971–2000 period, with the annual highest temperature averaging over the same period.
The absolute minimum temperature recorded at the Botanical Gardens site was , recorded in February 1947 Although a minimum of was recorded at the now defunct observatory site in December 1879. The last time the temperature fell below −15.0c was in January 1982 when was recorded. Most recently the temperature fell to on the 20 December 2010. The average frequency of air frosts ranges from 41.9 days at the NIAB site, to 47.2 days at the Botanical Gardens per year over the 1971–2000 period. Typically the coldest night of the year at the Botanical gardens will fall to . Such minimum temperatures and frost averages are typical for inland areas across much of southern and central England.
Rainfall is generally low, averaging around per year, with some years occasionally falling into the semi-arid (under of rain per year) category. Last time this occurred was in 2005 with 495.1mm of rain. Snowfall accumulations, though occurring most years, are similarly small, helped by some extent due to Cambridge's low elevation and low precipitation tendency during transitional snow events.
Sunshine averages around 1500 hours a year or around 35% of possible, a level typical of most locations throughout inland central England.
Demography
The demography in Cambridge changes considerably in and out of University term times, so can be hard to measure.
In the 2001 Census held during University term, 89.44% of Cambridge residents identified themselves as white, compared with a national average of 92.12%. Within the University, 84% of undergraduates and 80% of post-graduates identify as white (including overseas students).
Cambridge has a much higher than average proportion of people in the highest paid professional, managerial or administrative jobs (32.6% vs. 23.5%) and a much lower than average proportion of manual workers (27.6% vs. 40.2%). In addition, a much higher than average proportion of people have a high level qualification (e.g. degree, Higher National Diploma, Masters and PhDs), (41.2% vs. 19.7%).
Historical population of Cambridge
Year !! colspan="2"
Population
1801
1811
1821
1831
1841
1851
1861
Year !! colspan="2"
Population
1871
1881
1891
1901
1911
1921
1931
Year !! colspan="2"
Population
1941
''Data unavailable''
1951
1961
1971
1981
1991
2001
Census: Regional District 1801–1901
Civil Parish 1911–1961
District 1971–2001
Economy
Cambridge and its surrounds are sometimes referred to as Silicon Fen, an allusion to Silicon Valley, because of the density of high-tech businesses and technology incubators that have developed on science parks around the city. Many of these parks and buildings are owned or leased by university colleges, and the companies often have been spun out of the university. Such companies include Abcam, CSR, ARM Limited, CamSemi, Jagex and Sinclair. Microsoft chose to locate its Microsoft Research UK offices in a University of Cambridge technology park, separate from the main Microsoft UK campus in Reading.
Cambridge was also the home of Pye Ltd., who made radios and televisions and also defence equipment. In later years Pye evolved into several other companies including TETRA radio equipment manufacturer Pye Telecommunications. Another major business is Marshall Aerospace located on the eastern edge of the city. The Cambridge Network keeps businesses in touch with each other. The FTSE100 software company Autonomy Corporation is located at the Business Park on Cowley Road.
Cambridge played a unique role in the invention of modern football: the game's first set of rules were drawn up by members of the University in 1848. The Cambridge Rules were first played on Parker's Piece and had a "defining influence on the 1863 Football Association rules."
The city is home to Cambridge United F.C., who played in the Football League at the Abbey Stadium from 1970 to 2005, when they were relegated to Conference National, the division in which they currently compete. When relegation became inevitable the club was placed in administration with substantial debts, but it emerged from administration in time for the 2005–06 season. The club's biggest success came in the early 1990s, with two successive promotions, two successive FA Cup quarter-final appearances, a run to the Football League Cup quarter-finals, and reaching the brink of promotion to the new Premier League.
The River Cam running through the city centre is used for boating. The University has its own rowing club, Cambridge University Boat Club, and most of the individual colleges have boathouses on the river. The main focus of university rowing life are the two sets of bumps races held at the end of the Lent and Easter terms. Cambridgeshire Rowing Association was formed in 1868 and organises competitive rowing on the river outside of the University. Shallower parts of the Cam are used for recreational punting, a type of boating in which the craft is propelled by pushing against the river bed with a quant pole.
Other sports
As well as being the home of the Cambridge Rules in football, Parker's Piece was used for first-class cricket matches from 1817 to 1864. The University of Cambridge's Cricket ground, Fenner's, is located in the city and is one of the home grounds for minor counties team Cambridgeshire CCC. Cambridge is also home to two Real Tennis courts out of just 42 in the world at Cambridge University Real Tennis Club. British American Football League club Cambridgeshire Cats play at Coldham's Common. After a 10 year hiatus, the resurrected Cambridge Royals Baseball Club will also be once again competing in the British Baseball Federation in 2011. Cambridge has two cycling clubs Team Cambridge and Cambridge Cycling Club. Cambridge & Coleridge Athletic Club is the city's track and field club, based at the University of Cambridge's Wilberforce Road track.
Motorcycle speedway racing took place at the Greyhound Stadium in Newmarket Road in 1939 and the contemporary local press carried meeting reports and photographs of racing. It is not known if this venue operated in other years. The team raced as Newmarket as the meetings were organised by the Newmarket Motorcycle Club.
Varsity sports
Cambridge is also known for its university sporting events against Oxford, especially the rugby union Varsity Match and the Boat Race. These are followed by people across the globe, many of whom have no connection to the institutions themselves.
Theatre
Cambridge's main traditional theatre is the Arts Theatre, a venue with 666 seats in the town centre. The theatre often has touring shows, as well as those by local companies. The largest venue in the city to regular hold theatrical performances is the Cambridge Corn Exchange – capacity 1800 standing or 1200 seated. Housed within the city's 19th century former corn exchange building the venue was used for a variety of additional functions throughout the 20th century including tea parties, motor shows, sports matches and a music venue with temporary stage. The City Council renovated the building in the 1980s, turning it into a full-time arts venue, hosting theatre, dance and music performances.
The newest theatre venue in Cambridge is the 220-seat J2, also known as The Shed, part of the Junction complex in Cambridge Leisure Park. The venue was opened in 2004 and hosts live music, comedy and night clubs as well as traditional and contemporary theatre and dance.
The ADC Theatre is managed by the University of Cambridge, and typically has 3 shows a week during term time. The Mumford Theatre is part of Anglia Ruskin University, and hosts shows by both student and non student groups. There are also a number of venues within the colleges.
Several fairs and festivals take place in Cambridge, mostly during the British summer. Midsummer Fair dates back to 1211, when it was granted a charter by King John. Today it exists primarily as an annual funfair with the vestige of a market attached and is held over several days around or close to midsummers day. On the first Saturday in June Midsummer Common is also the site for Strawberry Fair, a free music and children's fair, with a series of market stalls. For one week in May, on nearby Jesus Green, the annual Cambridge Beer Festival is held. Started in 1974, it is Britain's second largest beer festival outside London. 90,000 pints of beer and a tonne of cheese were served in 2009.
Cambridge Folk Festival, one of the largest festivals of folk music in the UK, is held annually in the grounds of Cherry Hinton Hall on the outskirts of the city. The festival has been organised by the city council since its inception in 1964. The Cambridge Summer Music Festival is an annual festival of classical music, held in the University's colleges and chapels. Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is an eight-week season of open-air performances of the works of William Shakespeare, held in the gardens of the Colleges of The University of Cambridge. Started in 1977, the Cambridge Film Festival was held annually in July, but moved to September in 2008 to avoid a clash with the rescheduled Edinburgh Film Festival.
The East of England Ambulance Service covers the city and has an ambulance station on Hills Road. The smaller Brookfields Hospital is located on Mill Road. Cambridgeshire Constabulary provide the city's policing; the major police station is at Parkside, adjacent to the city's fire station, which is operated by Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service.
Following the Public Libraries Act 1850 the city's first public library, located on Jesus Lane, was opened in 1855. It was moved to the Guildhall in 1862, and is now located in the Grand Arcade shopping centre. The library was reopened in September 2009, after having been closed for refurbishment for 33 months, more than twice as long as was forecast when the library closed for redevelopment in January 2007.
A Buddhist centre was opened in the former Barnwell Theatre on Newmarket Road in 1998. In 2005 local Hindus began fundraising to build a shrine at the Bharat Bhavan Indian cultural centre off Mill Road, where Hindu and Hare Krishna groups conduct worship. Cambridge also has a number of secular groups, such as the Cambridge Humanists.
University
Great St Mary's Church has the status of being the "University Church". Many of the University colleges contain chapels that hold services according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, while the chapel of St Edmund's College is Roman Catholic. The city also has a number of theological colleges for training clergy for ordination into a number of denominations, with affiliations to both the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University. The University of Cambridge is also home to the evangelical Christian organisation Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union.
Twinned cities
Cambridge is twinned with two cities. Like Cambridge, both have universities and are also similar in population.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, he interrupted his studies in music to serve in the British Army. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry on 15 February 1941, and won the Military Cross as a temporary captain for his actions on the night of 10/11 July 1944, when he was serving with 5th Battalion DCLI as battalion intelligence officer. The battalion (part of 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division) was ordered to hold Hill 112 in Normandy, France. He carried out his duties outstandingly overnight, helping inflict severe casualties on the German forces by calling in artillery support to break up counter-attacks. The battalion suffered over 250 casualties during the night, including the commanding officer and one of the company commanders. This left Willcocks in command of the battalion headquarters, which by then was the furthest forward part of the battalion. He rallied the men, enabling the battalion to stand firm and reorganise. The award was gazetted on 21 December 1944.
He returned to Cambridge in 1945 to complete his studies, and in 1947 was elected a Fellow of King's College and appointed Conductor of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society. In the same year, he became the organist at Salisbury Cathedral and the conductor of the Salisbury Musical Society. He moved to Worcester Cathedral in 1950 and remained until 1957, during which time he was organist of the Cathedral, principal conductor of the Three Choirs Festival in 1951, 1954, and 1957, and conductor of the City of Birmingham Choir. From 1956 to 1974 he was also conductor of the Bradford Festival Choral Society, whilst continuing as guest conductor for their carol concerts into the early 1990s.
From 1957 to 1974 he held the post for which he is probably best known, Director of Music at King's College, Cambridge. In addition, he served as the organist of Cambridge University, conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society, and as University Lecturer. He made numerous recordings with the college choir; the choir toured extensively, giving concerts worldwide, as well as garnering further acclaim internationally through television and radio appearances. Under the baton of Willcocks, CUMS performed Benjamin Britten's ''War Requiem'' in 1963 in (Perugia) Milan, La Scala, and in Venice. The choir subsequently performed the work in Japan, Hong Kong, Portugal, and the Netherlands. In 1960, he also became the musical director of The Bach Choir in London.
On 15 May 2010, a celebration of his contribution to music took place at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where pieces selected by Willcocks were performed by singers who are part of The Really Big Chorus. Special guests included choristers from the Kings College, Cambridge, who performed three pieces. A portrait of Sir David was auctioned off in aid of The British Heart Foundation.
A notable broadcast took place on BBC Radio 4 on 21 September 2010 in a series called ''Soul Music'', when Willcocks profiled Fauré's ''Requiem''. The programme included his memories of the fighting at Hill 112. The profile also featured Christina, widow of Olaf Schmid. Willcocks questioned the morality of war.
Chang is also known for being an important academic influence on the economist Rafael Correa, currently President of Ecuador.
Background
After graduating from Seoul National University Department of Economics, he trained at the University of Cambridge. Chang's contribution to heterodox economics started while studying under Robert Rowthorn, a leading British Marxist economist, with whom he worked on the elaboration of the theory of industrial policy which he described as a middle way between central planning and unrestrained free market. His work in this area is part of a broader approach to economics known as institutionalist political economy which places economic history and socio-political factors at the centre of the evolution of economic practices.
The book's methodology was criticized by Douglas Irwin, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and author of a 2011 study of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, writing on the website of the Economic History Association:
Chang only looks at countries that developed during the nineteenth century and a small number of the policies they pursued. He did not examine countries that failed to develop in the nineteenth century and see if they pursued the same heterodox policies only more intensively. This is a poor scientific and historical method. Suppose a doctor studied people with long lives and found that some smoked tobacco, but did not study people with shorter lives to see if smoking was even more prevalent. Any conclusions drawn only from the observed relationship would be quite misleading.
In contrast, Stanley Engerman, Professor of Economic History at Rochester University praised Chang's approach:
Ha-Joon Chang has examined a large body of historical material to reach some very interesting and important conclusions about institutions and economic development. Not only is the historical
picture re-examined, but Chang uses this to argue the need for a changing attitude to the institutions desired in today's developing nations. Both as historical reinterpretation and policy advocacy, "Kicking Away the Ladder?" deserves a wide audience among economists, historians, and members of the policy establishment.
Following up on the ideas of ''Kicking Away the Ladder'', Chang published ''Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism'' in December 2008. Chang countered Irwin´s criticisms by arguing that, while state interventionism sometimes produced economic failures, it had a better record than unregulated free market economies which very rarely succeeded in producing economic development. He cited evidence that GDP growth in developing countries had been higher prior to external pressures recommending deregulation and extended his analysis to what he presented as the failures of free trade to induce growth through privatisation and anti-inflationary policies. Chang's book won plaudits from Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz but was criticised by economist William Easterly, who said that Chang used selective evidence in his book. Chang responded to Easterly's criticisms, asserting that Easterly misread his argument. Easterly in turn provided a counter-reply.
Chang's latest book is ''23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism''. Amongst many issues, he controversially claims that "the washing machine has changed society more than the Internet".
Bibliography
''The political economy of industrial policy'' (St. Martin's; 1994)
''Intellectual property rights and economic development: historical lessons and emerging issues'' (pamphlet) (TWN; 2001)
''Who benefits from the new international intellectual property rights regime?: and what should Africa do?'' (pamphlet) (ATPSN; 2001)
''Joseph Stiglitz and the World Bank: the rebel within'' (collection of Stiglitz speeches) (Anthem; 2001)
''Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective'' (Anthem; 2002)
''Globalization, Economic Development, and the Role of the State'' (essay collection) (Zed; 2002)
''Restructuring Korea Inc.'' (with Jang-Sup Shin) (Routledge; 2003)
''Reclaiming development: an alternative economic policy manual'' (with Ilene Grabel) (Zed; 2004)
''The East Asian development experience: the miracle, the crisis and the future'' (Zed; 2006)
''Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism'' (Bloomsbury; 2008)
''23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism'' (Penguin Books Ltd; 2010)
Avram Noam Chomsky (; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books.
Life and career
Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky)—a native of what is present-day Belarus—grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English". Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. Although Chomsky's mother was part of the radical activism in the 1930s, he was influenced largely by his uncle who, having never passed 4th grade, owned a newsstand that acted as an "intellectual center [where] professors of this and that argu[ed] all night". Chomsky was influenced also by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization, as well as by hanging around anarchist bookstores.
He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature", though he means more a "cultural ghetto than a physical one". Chomsky also describes tensions he experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."
Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.
A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—''The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew''—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.
In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967). With his wife Carol, Chomsky spent time in 1953 living in HaZore'a, a kibbutz in Israel. Asked in an interview whether the stay was "a disappointment" Chomsky replied, "No, I loved it"; however, he "couldn't stand the ideological atmosphere" and "fervent nationalism" in the early 1950s at the kibbutz, with Stalin being defended by many of the left-leaning kibbutz members who chose to paint a rosy image of future possibilities and contemporary realities in the USSR. Chomsky notes seeing many positive elements in the commune-like living of the kibbutz, in which parents and children lived together in separate houses, and when asked whether there were "lessons that we have learned from the history of the kibbutz", responded, that in "some respects, the kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself – for how long, it's hard to guess."
Chomsky joined the staff of MIT in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.
In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in ''The New York Review of Books''. This was followed by his 1969 book, ''American Power and the New Mandarins,'' a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets internationally. In 1977 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title: ''Intellectuals and the State''.
Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives. He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.
Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts, and travels often, giving lectures on politics.
Thought
Linguistics
Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his ''Syntactic Structures'', a distillation of his '' Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar. This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.
Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field, is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar although it is also related to rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.
It is a popular misconception that Chomsky proved that language is entirely innate and discovered a "universal grammar" (UG). In fact, Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has which the cat lacks the "language acquisition device" (LAD) and suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to figure out what the LAD is and what constraints it puts on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints are often termed "universal grammar" or UG.
The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P;)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as ''Lectures on Government and Binding'' (LGB)—makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.
Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.
More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.;
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of the language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates and Michael Tomasello argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.
His best-known work in phonology is ''The Sound Pattern of English'' (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply ''SPE''). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.
Generative grammar
The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed universal grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.
Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses. In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are different from English. Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism. In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory). Indeed, there is an equivalence between the Chomsky language hierarchy and the different kinds of automata. Thus theorems about languages are often dealt with as either languages (grammars) or automata.
An alternate method of dealing with languages is based upon Formal Power series. Formal Power series as well as the relationship between languages and semi-groups continued to occupy M. P. Schützenberger at the Sorbonne. Formal Power Series are similar to the Taylor Series one encounters in a course on Calculus, and is especially useful for languages where words (terminal symbols) are commutative.
Politics
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism. Although Chomsky tries to avoid the ambiguity of labels, his political views are often characterized in news accounts as "leftist" or "left-wing," and he has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union. He published a book on anarchism titled ''Chomsky on Anarchism'', published by the anarchist book collective AK Press in 2006.
Chomsky has engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events, which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those the powerful do not want to hear and for this reason he is considered an American political dissident.
Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic. He contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls.
Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorism, including "official definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s." Before its collapse, Chomsky also condemned Soviet imperialism; for example in 1986 during a question/answer following a lecture he gave at Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, when challenged about how he could "talk about North American imperialism and Russian imperialism in the same breath," Chomsky responded: "One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters."
Regarding the death of Osama bin Laden, Chomsky stated: "We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, [and] the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."
Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana are attacked because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poor. He has stated:
U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.
Chomsky is critical of the American "state capitalist" system and big business, he describes himself as a socialist, specifically an anarcho-syndicalist, and is critical of "authoritarian" communist branches of socialism. He also believes that socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. He believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."
Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."
Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:
One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow – the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.
Chomsky holds views that can be summarized as anti-war but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam War and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views with tax resistance and peace walks. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". He maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II to defeat the Axis powers was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. He believes that the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".
Chomsky has made many criticisms of the Israeli government, its supporters, the United States' support of the government and its treatment of the Palestinian people, arguing that " 'supporters of Israel' are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction" and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence." Chomsky disagreed with the founding of Israel as a Jewish state, saying, "I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state." Chomsky hesitated before publishing work critical of Israeli policies while his parents were alive, because he "knew it would hurt them" he says, "mostly because of their friends, who reacted hysterically to views like those expressed in my work." On May 16, 2010, Israeli authorities detained Chomsky and ultimately refused his entry to the West Bank via Jordan. A spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister indicated that the refusal of entry was simply due to a border guard who "overstepped his authority" and a second attempt to enter would likely be allowed. Chomsky disagreed, saying that the Interior Ministry official who interviewed him was taking instructions from his superiors. Chomsky maintained that based on the several hours of interviewing, he was denied entry because of the things he says and because he was visiting a university in the West Bank but no Israeli universities.
Chomsky has a broad view of free-speech rights, especially in the mass media, and opposes censorship. He has stated that "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards". With reference to the United States diplomatic cables leak, Chomsky suggested that "perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government -- Hillary Clinton, others -- and also by the diplomatic service." Chomsky refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him and prefers to counter libels through open letters in newspapers. One notable example of this approach is his response to an article by Emma Brockes in ''The Guardian'' which alleged he denied the existence of the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky's complaint prompted The Guardian to publish an apologetic correction and to withdraw the article from the paper's website.
Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:
I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs.
Some critics have accused Chomsky of hypocrisy when, in spite of his political criticism of American and European military imperialism,
early research at the institution (MIT) where he did his linguistic research had been substantially funded by the American military. Chomsky makes the argument that because he has received funding from the U.S. military, he has an even greater responsibility to criticize and resist its immoral actions.
He is also an outspoken advocate against the use of the death penalty and has spoken against the execution of Steven Woods.
I think the death penalty is a crime no matter what the circumstances, and it is particularly awful in the Steven Woods case. I strongly oppose the execution of Steven Woods on September 13, 2011.
In March of 2012, Chomsky endorsed Jill Stein for President of the United States in 2012, saying,
Media
Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests. Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media'' (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)
The model attempts to explain this perceived systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through," which combine to systematically distort news coverage.
In explaining the first filter, ownership, he notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model expects them to publish news that reflects the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups that attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an elite consensus, frame public debate within elite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.
Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic elite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."
They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to elite interests.
Science
Chomsky sees science as a straightforward search for explanation, and rejects the views of it as a catalog of facts or mechanical explanations. In this light, the majority of his contributions to science have been frameworks and hypotheses, rather than "discoveries."
As such, he considers certain so-called post-structuralist or postmodern critiques of logic and reason to be nonsensical:
I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.
Although Chomsky believes that a scientific background is important to teach proper reasoning, he holds that science in general is "inadequate" to understand complicated problems like human affairs:
Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them... But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.
Psychology
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.
In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's ''Verbal Behavior'', a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. He defined "Verbal Behavior" as learned behavior that has characteristic consequences delivered through the learned behavior of others. This makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky—Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.
In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned," cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.
Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper ''On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 13, pages 83–99). MacCorquodale's argument was updated and expanded in important respects by Nathan Stemmer in a 1990 paper, ''Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky's review, and mentalism'' (''Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,'' volume 54, pages 307–319). These and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties. Consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. The review has been further critiqued for misrepresenting the work of Skinner and others, including by quoting out of context. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy."
It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 ''Cartesian Linguistics'' and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.
There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to Jean Piaget at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (''Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky,'' Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Philippe Courrège and Antoine Danchin, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by Jacques Mehler and Stanislas Dehaene in particular in the domain of numerical cognition lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).
Debates
Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. He has had notable debates with Jean Piaget, Michel Foucault, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, George Lakoff, Richard Perle, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, and Alan Dershowitz, to name a few. In response to his speaking style being criticized as boring, Chomsky said that "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way.... I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is.... People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."
Influence
''Chomskyan'' models have been used as a theoretical basis in various fields of study. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.
The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of
protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".
Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "...I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 ... Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".
In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany. In April 2010, Chomsky became the third scholar to receive the University of Wisconsin's A.E. Havens Center's Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship.
Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine ''Prospect''. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls". In a list compiled by the magazine ''New Statesman'' in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".
On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University.
In June 2011, Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which cited his "unfailing courage, critical analysis of power and promotion of human rights".
In 2011, Chomsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".
Procedure of Admission Interviews in Cambridge University Official Video 01
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Procedure of Admission Interviews in Cambridge University Official Video 01
www.wikisuniversity.com provides the procedure of Admission Interviews in Cambridge University Official Video. How to apply to university of Cambridge complete detailed video of information.
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Under the Microscope #6
CambridgeUniversity
Under the Microscope #6
In this video we see a killer T cell of the immune system attacking a cancer cell. Cambridge University's Under the Microscope is a collection of videos that show glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up. They are released every Monday and Thursday for the next few weeks and you can see them here: bit.ly Professor Gillian Griffiths: "Cells of the immune system protect the body against pathogens. If cells in our bodies are infected by viruses, or become cancerous, then killer cells of the immune system identify and destroy the affected cells. Cytotoxic T cells are very precise and efficient killers. They are able to destroy infected or cancerous cells, without destroying healthy cells surrounding them. The Wellcome Trust funded laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, investigates just how this is accomplished. By understanding how this works, we can develop ways to control killer cells. This will allow us to find ways to improve cancer therapies, and ameliorate autoimmune diseases caused when killer cells run amok and attack healthy cells in our bodies." Cytotoxic T cells are just 10 microns in length: approximately one-tenth the width of a human hair. These movies are 92 times real time. The original footage shown was made by Alex Ritter, a PhD student on the NIH-OxCam programme, in the laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the Department of <b>...</b>
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Abide With Me (King's College Choir, Cambridge)
aNGLICANcHOIR92
Abide With Me (King's College Choir, Cambridge)
Disclaimer: I do not own this. "Abide with Me" is a Christian hymn written by Scottish Anglican Henry Francis Lyte. He wrote it in 1847 while he lay dying from tuberculosis; he survived only a further three weeks after its completion. 1. Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me. 2. Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; earth's joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changest not, abide with me. 3. I need thy presence every passing hour. What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power? Who, like thyself, my guide and stay can be? Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me. 4. I fear no foe, with thee at hand to bless; ills have no weight, and tears not bitterness. Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory? I triumph still, if thou abide with me. 5. Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; shine through the gloom and point me to the skies. Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee; in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
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King`s College Choir, Cambridge - In dulci jubilo (Carols from King 2001)
Suila2007
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - In dulci jubilo (Carols from King 2001)
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - In dulci jubilo (Carols from King 2001)
3:40
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - God rest you merry gentlemen (Carols from King 2001)
Suila2007
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - God rest you merry gentlemen (Carols from King 2001)
King`s College Choir, Cambridge - God rest you merry gentlemen (Carols from King 2001)
6:33
Cambridge Ideas - The Emotional Computer
CambridgeUniversity
Cambridge Ideas - The Emotional Computer
Can computers understand emotions? Can computers express emotions? Can they feel emotions? The latest video from the University of Cambridge shows how emotions can be used to improve interaction between humans and computers.
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![Elmwood, also known as the Oliver-Gerry-Lowell House,[2] is a registered historic house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known for its several prominent former residents, including: Andrew Oliver (1706–74), royal Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts; Elbridge Gerry (1744–1814), signer of the US Declaration of Independence and whose political tactics earned the term gerrymandering, and Vice President of the United States; and James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), noted American writer, poet, and foreign](http://web.archive.org./web/20120423191414/http://cdn8.wn.com/pd/53/4a/e31ff7761de1337a4a9bb923a63e_medium.jpg "Elmwood, also known as the Oliver-Gerry-Lowell House,[2] is a registered historic house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known for its several prominent former residents, including: Andrew Oliver (1706–74), royal Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts; Elbridge Gerry (1744–1814), signer of the US Declaration of Independence and whose political tactics earned the term gerrymandering, and Vice President of the United States; and James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), noted American writer, poet, and foreign")
