X-Nico

20 unusual facts about University of Cambridge


Alice Goodman

She was educated at Harvard University and Cambridge where she studied English and American literature.

Charles Edward Moss

He took up the post of Curator of the Herbarium at the University of Cambridge in January 1908.

Christopher Chippindale

He is a Reader in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and works at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he is Senior Curator (Archaeology).

First and Third Trinity Boat Club May Ball

The First and Third Trinity Boat Club May Ball, informally known as Trinity May Ball, is an end-of-year party held annually during the month of June at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

John Henry Warcup

Born in New Zealand in 1921, Jack moved to the UK to undertake his PhD, examining distribution of fungi through soil profiles at Lakenheath Warren, in the University of Cambridge's botany department.

Joseph Priestley and Dissent

Between 1660 and 1665, Parliament passed a series of laws that restricted the rights of dissenters: they could not hold political office, teach school, serve in the military or attend Oxford and Cambridge unless they ascribed to the thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.

Ludwik Silberstein

At the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1912 at Cambridge, Silberstein spoke on "Some applications of quaternions".

May week

May Week, the celebratory week at the end of the academic year at Cambridge University

Noël Olivier

She met the poet Rupert Brooke at a supper party in May 1907, prior to a meeting of the Cambridge Fabians which her father had been invited to address.

Phillip Darrell Duppa

He attended Cambridge University and learned the classics and five languages before moving to Prescott, Arizona in 1863, probably related to prospecting in the region at the time.

Purity of Diction in English Verse

The book was written for the most part in Plymouth, and Davie put into it much of what he had learned at Cambridge.

Sarah Bridle

Prof Bridle received a first class Masters in Natural Sciences from University of Cambridge in 1997.

Smuts Hall

The result was the design of cloisters giving access to a number of "entries", "staircases" or "flats" modeled on the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges.

Stuart A. Aaronson

He earned his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center in 1966, and completed a fellowship at the University of Cambridge in England and an internship in medicine at Moffitt Hospital in San Francisco.

Ted Tripp

He attended boarding school and, despite taking the University of Cambridge entrance examination, became an apprentice to an engineer.

The Chaplin Society

The Chaplin Society is a monarchist gentlemen's dining society, based at Peterhouse, at the University of Cambridge.

The Common Pursuit

The Common Pursuit is a play by Simon Gray which follows the lives of six characters who first meet as undergraduates at Cambridge University when they are involved in setting up a literary magazine called The Common Pursuit.

Thomas Hobson

When they were not needed to deliver mail, Hobson's horses were rented to students and academic staff of the university.

Tim Godwin

He also received a BA (Hons) degree in Public Sector Police Studies from the University of Portsmouth and a Diploma in Applied Criminology from the University of Cambridge, where he studied at Fitzwilliam College.

William Bate Hardy

He was born in Erdington, Birmingham and graduated with a Master of Arts from the University of Cambridge, where he carried out biochemical research.


Alfred Chilton Pearson

At the age of 58, and despite a life spent outside academia, Pearson was elected in 1919 as the Gladstone Professor of Greek at the University of Liverpool, subsequently becoming in 1921 the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity College.

Andrew Barnard

He had the honorary dignity of M.A. conferred on him by the university of Cambridge in 1842, and was a governor of the Royal Academy of Music, of which institution he was one of the early promoters.

Anurag Singh

Singh later attended the University of Cambridge and captained Cambridge University Cricket Club in 1997 and 1998, playing against opposing captain and friend Mark Wagh in the annual Oxford vs Cambridge varsity match at Lord's.

Artur Ekert

From 2002 until early 2007 he was the Leigh-Trapnell Professor of Quantum Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University and a Professorial Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

Brit Andresen

In addition to the Universities of Cambridge and Queensland, Andresen has held teaching positions at the Architectural Association in London, the School of Architecture and Urban Planning UCLA, Bristol University School of Architecture and a guest lecturing position at The Royal University of Malta.

Cambridge Medical School building

The building for the Cambridge Medical School of the University of Cambridge was designed in 1899 by Edward Schroeder Prior.

Carenza Lewis

Educated at the school (since closed) of the Church of England Community of All Hallows, Norfolk, and at the University of Cambridge, in 1985 she joined the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (now part of English Heritage) as a field archaeologist for Wessex.

Çatalhöyük

After this scandal, the site lay idle until 1993, when investigations began under the leadership of Ian Hodder then at the University of Cambridge.

Christopher Layne

Diploma in Historical Studies, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge

Cuthbert Tunstall

Cuthbert studied mathematics, theology, and law at Oxford, Cambridge, and Padua, where he graduated Doctor of Laws.

David E. Green

He then moved to England and worked for eight years at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Malcolm Dixon, on redox reactions in biological systems.

David Lary

He received a first class double honors BSc in physics and chemistry from King's College London (1987) with the Sambrooke Exhibition Prize in Natural Science, and a PhD in atmospheric chemistry from the University of Cambridge, Department of Chemistry while at Churchill College (1991).

He then held post-doctoral research assistant and associate positions at the University of Cambridge until receiving a Royal Society research fellowship in 1996 (also at Cambridge).

Doctoral Training Centre

The Cambridge Centre for Analysis (CCA) is a Centre for Doctoral Training which offers a PhD course in mathematical analysis at the University of Cambridge, directed by Professor James R. Norris and Professor Arieh Iserles.

Earls Colne

Earls Colne is one of the best recorded villages in the UK and has been the subject of a study undertaken between 1972 and 2002 by Professor Alan Macfarlane and his team from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Electro-kinetic road ramp

The idea was dismissed as Talk of 'kinetic energy plates' is a total waste of energy in the Guardian by David MacKay, the professor of natural philosophy in the department of Physics at the University of Cambridge.

Eli Franklin Burton

From 1904 to 1906 he studied colloids with J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, writing an important monograph on the subject in 1938.

Gar Alperovitz

He is a former Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics; a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Geoffrey de Freitas

De Freitas was educated at Haileybury and Clare College, Cambridge, where he was a successful student and athlete, and was president of the Cambridge Union for a term.

Girton, Cambridgeshire

It lies about two miles to the northwest of Cambridge, and is the home of Cambridge University's Girton College, a pioneer in women's education, which was moved there from a previous site in Hertfordshire in 1872.

Inge Lehmann

After having finished school, she studied, with some interruptions due to poor health, mathematics at the University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge.

John Eatwell, Baron Eatwell

Lord Eatwell was educated at Headlands Grammar School in Swindon in Wiltshire, followed by Queens' College at the University of Cambridge, where he gained a B.A., followed by Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar, where he obtained a Ph.D. and returned to Queens' as a research fellow.

Joseph Lipman

He was a member of the MSRI and visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and the University of Nice and a visiting professor at the Columbia University and Harvard University.

Maurice Edwards

Edwards was born on 17 May 1886, he was educated at Ripon Grammar School and Queens' College, University of Cambridge.

Menachem Ben-Sasson

After doing a post-doctorate at the University of Cambridge, he became a professor of the History of the Jewish Nation.

Michael D. Towler

Michael D. Towler (also referred to as Mike Towler, complete name Michael David Towler) is a British theoretical physicist associated with the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and currently research associate at University College, London and College Lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Napier Shaw

He studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Cambridge.

Owen Chadwick

As Vice-Chancellor he guided Cambridge through turbulent times in the late 1960s; and was Chancellor of the University of East Anglia between 1984 and 1994.

Richard Hosking

Richard Hosking, a graduate of the University of Cambridge and emeritus professor of Sociology and English at Hiroshima Shudo University, has lived in London since 1998 and is a writer on Japanese food.

Ronald George Wreyford Norrish

Norrish rejoined Emmanuel College as a Research Fellow in 1925 and later became the Head of the Physical Chemistry Department at the University of Cambridge, occupying part of the Lensfield Road Building with the separate department 'Chemistry' (which encompassed organic, theoretical and inorganic chemistry).

Roy McElroy

He was a lawyer, trained at the University of Auckland, and the University of Cambridge, where he got a PhD in law in 1935, and was partner in the Auckland law firm of McElroy, Duncan and Preddle.

Somak Raychaudhury

He then proceeded to obtain a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, as a member of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1990, supported by an Isaac Newton Studentship.

Temasek Junior College

TJC students have been admitted to universities including MIT, Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Duke, LSE, University of Toronto, McGill, UCLA, Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, Peking University and Amherst.

Terrington St Clement

The magnificent Parish Church, dedicated to St Clement (i.e. Pope Clement I), known as the "Cathedral of the Marshland", was built in the 14th century by Edmund Gonville, Rector of Terrington, who founded Gonville Hall (now Gonville and Caius College) at Cambridge University.

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online

University of Cambridge is Director of the project; James Secord of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and Janet Browne of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London were the principal investigators for the grant.

The Ghost Club

Formally launched in London in 1862 (attracting some lighthearted ridicule in The Times), it counted amongst its early members Charles Dickens and Cambridge academics and clergymen.

The Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel

It was also claimed that Westbrook was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, however, the college replied stating no such person was in employment there.

Tibor Scitovsky

He was educated at the Pázmány Péter University (from which he held an undergraduate degree in law), University of Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.

Tin Tut

Dulwich and Cambridge educated Tin Tut was the first Burmese to become an Indian Civil Service officer.

Tony Leavey

He went to Mill Hill School and then Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge before returning to east Lancashire where he became a director of companies involved in the weaving and matchmaking industries in Colne and Rawtenstall.

University of Guyana

Drayton returned to British Guiana in December 1962, and it was on his advice that Jagan wrote to socialist scholars in the United Kingdom and United States, including Joan Robinson at the University of Cambridge, Paul Baran at Stanford University, and Lancelot Hogben at Birmingham to involve them in the recruitment of staff.

Victor Stiebel

Born in Durban he arrived in Britain in 1924 to study architecture at Jesus College, Cambridge.

William Bellenden

One of the few that survived was placed in the university library at Cambridge, and freely drawn upon by Conyers Middleton, the librarian, in his History of the Life of Cicero.

Xenoglossy

A later examination by John D. Ray (the current Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge) confirmed "there could be no mistaking Hulme's incompetence".