Mathematics at St John’s

St John’s College has a welcoming and well-established mathematical community. We currently have five Teaching Fellows, a number of Research Fellows and four Professors. Every year we are joined by around fifteen undergraduates who come to St John’s to read Mathematics. Any Johnian mathematician automatically becomes a member of the Adams Society!

You can find out more about the mathematics course at the St John’s website, including an overview of the course, entry requirements and student views.

John Couch Adams

St John’s has a rich history in mathematics. Our society is named after Johnian John Couch Adams (1819-1892), who was senior wrangler in 1843. John Couch Adams predicted the existence and position of the planet Neptune using nothing but mathematics: he considered discrepancies with the orbit of Uranus and used Kepler’s and Newton’s laws of planetary motion and gravitation. He held the Lowndean chair of Astronomy and Geometry in Cambridge for 33 years and won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Adams Prize, a prestigous University Mathematics Prize, is named in his honour.

There is a long list of other famous Johnian mathematicians:

  • John Dee (1527–1608), mathematician, astronomer, magician, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I
  • Brook Taylor, FRS (1685–1731), known for Taylor’s theorem and Taylor series
  • Fearon Fallows (1789–1831), astronomer
  • Sir John Herschel, FRS (1792–1871), mathematician, astronomer and chemist, Senior Wrangler in 1813
  • James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), mathematician
  • William Burnside (1852–1927), mathematician, Second Wrangler in 1875, known for Burnside’s lemma and Burnside’s theorem
  • Sir Joseph Larmor (1857–1942), Senior Wrangler and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
  • Paul Dirac, FRS (1902-1984), Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist
  • Sir Harold Jeffreys, FRS (1891–1989), mathematician, statistician, geophysicist, and astronomer
  • George Barnard (1915–2002), statistician
  • Sir W. V. D. Hodge (1903–1975), geometer, known for Hodge theory and Hodge conjecture
  • Sir Maurice Wilkes, FRS (1913–2010), one of the founding fathers of modern computer science, known for helping to build EDSAC, one of the earliest stored-program computers
  • Sir David Cox (1924–2022), statistician
  • Sir Roger Penrose (*1931), mathematical physicist and philosopher

And there are certainly many more to come in the future!