Since the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century, a great number of distinguished scientists and mathematicians have been associated with Cambridge University. Cambridge Scientific Minds is a unique account of some of the University's most eminent thinkers over the last 400 years, including Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and James Clerk Maxwell. While the rapid establishment during the Newtonian era of a series of professorships for mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, anatomy, botany, geology, and geometry marked the University's scientific coming of age, this volume's chronological...

Originally published in 1983.This volume outlines some of the important innovations in astronomy, natural philosophy and medicine which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and shows how the transformation in world-view during the period was affected by broader historical terms. Themes such as the spread of Puritanism, the decline of witchcraft and magic, and the incorporation of science as an integral part of the intellectual milieu of late seventeenth-century England.