Oxford's Savilian Professors of Astronomy The First 400 Years

The Savilian Professorships in Astronomy and Geometry at Oxford University were founded in 1619 by Sir Henry Savile, distinguished scholar and Warden of Merton College. The Astronomy professorship, in particular, is the earliest University-based chair of astronomy in England, predating the earliest Cambridge equivalent by about sixty years. Written by renowned astronomers and historians of science, this accessible and lavishly illustrated book outlines the first 400 years of Oxford's Savilian Professors of Astronomy. Starting with John Bainbridge, Seth Ward, and Christopher Wren, this volume proceeds via such major figures as David Gregory, James Bradley, and Thomas Hornsby, to the 19th- and 20th-century figures of Stephen Rigaud, Charles Pritchard, and Herbert Hall Turner, concluding with the most recent professor, Steven Balbus, one of the editors of this book. This volume assumes no technical background in astronomy, and should therefore appeal to the general reader with an interest in astronomy and related sciences. It should also be of interest to anyone interested in the history of astronomy or in the development of Oxford and its University. To all of these audiences it offers portraits of astronomers at work and an accessible exposition of astronomy's history in the context of its times.

1 - Sir Henry Savile and the early professors
2 - Interregnum and Restoration
3 - The Newtonians
4 - James Bradley
5 - The Enlightenment professors
6 - The Victorians
7 - The 20th century
8 - The golden age of cosmology
9 - Interview with Steven Balbus

Robin Wilson is an Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, and of Geometry at Gresham College, London, and is a former Fellow of Keble College, Oxford University. A former President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, he has written and edited over fifty books on mathematics and its history, including sixteen books for OUP. Involved with the popularization and communication of these subjects, he has received international awards for his 'outstanding expository writing' and for his outreach activities. Steven Balbus is the Emeritus Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, a Senior Research Fellow at New College, and an Honorary Professor at University College London. He read mathematics and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his undergraduate studies and gained his PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Virginia, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Widely recognised for his work in theoretical astrophysics, he is the recipient of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the Eddington Medal of the RAS, the Dirac Medal of the IOP, and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.