William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science.
47 Facts About William Whewell
2.
William Whewell published work in mechanics, physics, geology, astronomy, and economics, while composing poetry, writing a Bridgewater Treatise, translating the works of Goethe, and writing sermons and theological tracts.
3.
In mathematics, William Whewell introduced what is called the William Whewell equation, defining the shape of a curve without reference to an arbitrarily chosen coordinate system.
4.
William Whewell organized thousands of volunteers internationally to study ocean tides, in what is considered one of the first citizen science projects.
5.
William Whewell received the Royal Medal for this work in 1837.
6.
William Whewell corresponded with many in his field and helped them come up with neologisms for their discoveries.
7.
William Whewell coined, among other terms, scientist, physicist, linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism; he suggested to Michael Faraday the terms electrode, ion, dielectric, anode, and cathode.
8.
William Whewell died in Cambridge in 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse.
9.
William Whewell was born in Lancaster, the son of John William Whewell and his wife, Elizabeth Bennison.
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William Whewell's father was a master carpenter, and wished him to follow his trade, but William's success in mathematics at Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Heversham grammar school won him an exhibition at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1812.
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William Whewell was the eldest of seven children having three brothers and three sisters born after him.
12.
William Whewell's mother died in 1807, when Whewell was 13 years old.
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William Whewell's father died in 1816, the year Whewell received his bachelor degree at Trinity College, but before his most significant professional accomplishments.
14.
William Whewell married, firstly, in 1841, Cordelia Marshall, daughter of John Marshall.
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William Whewell was Second Wrangler in 1816, President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1817, became fellow and tutor of his college.
16.
William Whewell was professor of mineralogy from 1828 to 1832 and Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy from 1838 to 1855.
17.
William Whewell influenced the syllabus of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, which undergraduates studied.
18.
William Whewell was a proponent of 'mixed mathematics': applied mathematics, descriptive geometry and mathematical physics, in contrast with pure mathematics.
19.
William Whewell believed an intuitive geometrical understanding of mathematics, based on Euclid and Newton, was most appropriate.
20.
William Whewell died in Cambridge in 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse.
21.
William Whewell was buried in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, whilst his wives are buried together in the Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge.
22.
In 1826 and 1828, William Whewell was engaged with George Airy in conducting experiments in Dolcoath mine in Cornwall, in order to determine the density of the earth.
23.
William Whewell was the author of an Essay on Mineralogical Classification, published in 1828, and carried out extensive work on the tides.
24.
When William Whewell started his work on tides, there was a theory explaining the forces causing the tides, based on the work of Newton, Bernoulli, and Laplace.
25.
John Lubbock, a former student of William Whewell's, had analysed the available historic data for several ports to allow tables to be generated on a theoretical basis, publishing the methodology.
26.
William Whewell built on Lubbock's work to develop an understanding of tidal patterns around the world that could be used to generate predictions for many locations without the need for long series of tidal observations at each port.
27.
William Whewell made extensive use of graphical methods, and these became not just ways of displaying results, but tools in the analysis of data.
28.
William Whewell published a number of maps showing cotidal lines - lines joining points where high tide occurred at the same time.
29.
From this, William Whewell predicted that there should be a place where there was no tidal rise or fall in the southern part of the North Sea.
30.
In 1840, the naval surveyor William Hewett confirmed Whewell's prediction.
31.
William Whewell was an accomplished artist of geological landscapes and his pencil drawing of the Wren's Nest, Dudley was printed in Roderick Murchison's 'Siluria'.
32.
William Whewell published about 20 papers over a period of 20 years on his tidal researches.
33.
William Whewell examined ideas and by the "colligation of facts" endeavored to unite these ideas with the facts and so construct science.
34.
William Whewell refers to as an example Kepler and the discovery of the elliptical orbit: the orbit's points were colligated by the conception of the ellipse, not by the discovery of new facts.
35.
In Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences William Whewell was the first to use the term "consilience" to discuss the unification of knowledge between the different branches of learning.
36.
William Whewell explicitly rejects the hypothetico-deductive claim that hypotheses discovered by non-rational guesswork can be confirmed by consequentialist testing.
37.
William Whewell often corresponded with many in his field and helped them come up with new terms for their discoveries.
38.
William Whewell came up with the term scientist itself in 1833, and it was first published in William Whewell's anonymous 1834 review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences published in the Quarterly Review.
39.
William Whewell was prominent not only in scientific research and philosophy but in university and college administration.
40.
William Whewell opposed the appointment of the University Commission and wrote two pamphlets against the reform of the university.
41.
William Whewell stood against the scheme of entrusting elections to the members of the senate and instead, advocated the use of college funds and the subvention of scientific and professorial work.
42.
William Whewell was elected Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1841, and retained that position until his death in 1866.
43.
William Whewell is best known for his writings on Gothic architecture, specifically his book, Architectural Notes on German Churches.
44.
William Whewell's work is associated with the "scientific trend" of architectural writers, along with Thomas Rickman and Robert Willis.
45.
William Whewell paid from his own resources for the construction of two new courts of rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, built in a Gothic style.
46.
Between 1835 and 1861 William Whewell produced various works on the philosophy of morals and politics, the chief of which, Elements of Morality, including Polity, was published in 1845.
47.
William Whewell was one of the Cambridge dons whom Charles Darwin met during his education there, and when Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage he was directly influenced by William Whewell, who persuaded Darwin to become secretary of the Geological Society of London.