The URL of this page is:
University_of_St_Andrews,_Scotland
| Previous | (Chronologically) | Next | Biographies Index |
| Previous | (Alphabetically) | Next | Main index |
At Oxford Hooke met Boyle and in 1655 he was employed by Boyle to construct his air pump. In 1660 he discovered Hooke's law of elasticity. Hooke worked on optics, simple harmonic motion and stress in stretched strings. For 30 years he was professor of geometry at Gresham College, London, being appointed there in 1665.
The year 1665 was the one when Hooke first achieved worldwide scientific fame. His book Micrographia, published that year, contains beautiful pictures of objects Hooke had studied through a microscope he had made himself. The book also contains a number of fundamental biological discoveries. Pepys wrote in his diary
Before I went to bed I sat up till two o'clock in my chamber reading Mr Hooke's Microscopical Observations, the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.Hooke invented the conical pendulum and was the first person to build a Gregorian reflecting telescope. He made important astronomical observations including the fact that Jupiter revolves on its axis and his drawings of Mars were later used to determine its period of rotation. In 1666 he proposed that gravity could be measured using a pendulum.
In addition to his post as professor of geometry at Gresham College, London Hooke held the post of City Surveyor. He was a very competent architect and was chief assistant to Wren in his project to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666.
In 1672 Hooke attempted to prove that the Earth moves in an ellipse round the Sun and six years later proposed that inverse square law of gravitation to explain planetary motions. Hooke wrote to Newton in 1679 asking for his opinion:-
of compounding the celestiall motions of the planetts of a direct motion by the tangent (inertial motion) and an attractive motion towards the centrall body ... my supposition is that the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall...Hooke seemed unable to give a mathematical proof of his conjectures. However he claimed priority over the inverse square law and this led to a bitter dispute with Newton who, as a consequence, removed all references to Hooke from the Principia.
No portrait of Hooke is known to exist. A possible reason for this is that he has been described as a
lean, bent and ugly manand so he may not have been willing to sit for a painting of his portrait.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Click on this link to see a list of the Glossary entries for this page
|
List of References (29 books/articles)
| Some Quotations (2)
|
| Mathematicians born in the same country
| |
| Cross-references to History Topics | |
| Honours awarded to Robert Hooke (Click a link below for the full list of mathematicians honoured in this way) | |
| Fellow of the Royal Society | Elected 1663
|
| Lunar features | Crater Hooke
|
| Lunar features | Crater Hooke on Mars |
| Other Web sites |
|
|
JOC/EFR February 1997
The URL of this page is: |
School_of_Mathematics_and_Statistics University_of_St_Andrews,_Scotland |
|
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Hooke.html
| | |