Category:Famous Cambridge Alumni

Frederick Sanger won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, in 1958 for sequencing insulin and in 1980 for sequencing DNA, and did both pieces of work in Cambridge. This category collects biographical entries on people who studied at the University of Cambridge, and the roster leans heavily toward the laboratory bench and the blackboard: molecular biology on one side, pure mathematics and theoretical physics on the other. A smaller third strand runs through British public life, and it reaches the wiki through the same colleges and the same student societies as the scientists.

Cambridge is a collegiate university. Students belong both to the university, which runs the faculties and awards the degrees, and to one of its colleges, which admits them, houses them and supervises their teaching. The colleges are not incidental here. Trinity, Gonville and Caius, St John's, King's, Christ's, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Queens', Fitzwilliam and Clare all appear by name in these biographies, and in several entries the college is the unit that explains the career: Amartya Sen studied economics at Trinity and returned decades later as its Master, and Mohamed El-Erian read for his first degree at Queens' and later became its president.

One chair recurs across the physics and mathematics entries. Isaac Newton succeeded Isaac Barrow as the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669 and held the post until 1702. Paul Dirac held it from 1932 to 1969, and Stephen Hawking from 1979 to 2009. Two of the three arrived as students first: Newton entered Trinity in 1661 as a subsizar, paying his way by performing tasks for wealthier undergraduates, and Dirac came to St John's in 1923 for graduate study in physics.

The densest cluster in this category is molecular biology, and it traces to two institutions in the city. Max Perutz founded and chaired the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the structure of haemoglobin. Francis Crick enrolled as a doctoral student at the Cavendish Laboratory under Perutz's supervision and shared the 1962 prize in physiology or medicine for the structure of DNA. Sanger spent effectively his whole career between the university and the same MRC laboratory.

The laboratory kept producing members long after that generation. Gregory Winter worked there for nearly his entire research career and shared the 2018 chemistry prize for humanising mouse antibodies for therapeutic use. Richard Henderson moved to Cambridge for doctoral work and later shared the 2017 chemistry prize for the electron microscopy that produced the first atomic-resolution image of a biological molecule. John Sulston read natural sciences at Pembroke, stayed for a doctorate in chemistry, and shared the 2002 medicine prize for tracing the fate of every cell in a nematode worm.

Supervision chains run through the roster as clearly as institutions do. Elizabeth Blackburn came from Australia for doctoral work under Sanger before the telomerase research that won her a share of the 2009 medicine prize. Roger Y. Tsien arrived from Harvard for a doctorate under Richard Adrian and began there the work on fluorescent molecules that led to the 2008 chemistry prize. Martin Evans took a scholarship to Christ's College and went on to isolate mouse embryonic stem cells. Tim Hunt was an undergraduate and postgraduate at the university before discovering cyclins, and Michael Levitt completed his doctorate there before the multiscale modelling that won a share of the 2013 chemistry prize.

The Fields Medal recurs through the mathematics entries in this category. Klaus Roth studied mathematics at Cambridge and won the medal in 1958 for his theorem on rational approximation to algebraic numbers, the first British-based mathematician to receive it. Michael Atiyah won it in 1966 and later served as Master of Trinity. Alan Baker read mathematics at University College London, came to Cambridge for graduate study under Harold Davenport, won the medal in 1970 and remained a Fellow of Trinity. Enrico Bombieri spent time at Trinity after his studies in Milan and won it in 1974. Richard Borcherds and Timothy Gowers both won it in 1998, Borcherds for the proof of the monstrous moonshine conjecture and Gowers for work joining functional analysis to combinatorics.

The physics entries follow the same undergraduate-to-doctorate pattern. Dirac formulated the equation that predicted antimatter. Roger Penrose completed his doctorate at St John's in 1957 and shared the 2020 physics prize for the mathematics of gravitational collapse. J. Michael Kosterlitz read physics at Gonville and Caius before the work on two-dimensional phase transitions that won a share of the 2016 prize, and F. Duncan Haldane took both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Cambridge before sharing the same prize. John Pople was encouraged by his teachers at Bristol Grammar School to apply, and went on to build the computational methods in quantum chemistry recognised in 1998. Geoffrey Hinton read experimental psychology as an undergraduate, which is an unusual entry point for a physics laureate.

The political and cultural entries are fewer but they share a route. Michael Howard read law at Peterhouse and was President of the Cambridge Union before the House of Commons and the leadership of the Conservative Party. Charles III enrolled at Trinity in 1967 and read archaeology, anthropology and history. Manmohan Singh studied at St John's before the doctorate that preceded his career in Indian economic policy and the premiership. Jane Fraser read economics at Cambridge before the career in banking that took her to the chief executive's office at Citigroup, and John Maynard Keynes was trained in mathematics at King's before the work that reshaped macroeconomic policy.

Two student societies do real work in these biographies. Christopher Nolan read English literature at Gonville and Caius and became president of the Cambridge University Film Society, which gave him access to professional 16 mm equipment and an audience for his early short films. Jonathan Lynn read law at Pembroke and performed in the Cambridge Footlights before writing Yes Minister. Jimmy Carr read political science at Gonville and Caius, the same college as Nolan and Kosterlitz, before leaving a marketing job for stand-up. Stewart Butterfield pursued graduate study at Clare before Flickr and Slack, and Potter Stewart came to Cambridge after Yale College and before twenty-three years on the United States Supreme Court.

A recent tail of the category is made up of founders who took a Cambridge master's degree and then left for startup work, among them Sepand Dyanatkar, Nicole Atack, Oli Wales, Oliver Lambson and Thomas Marge.

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