Sir Christopher Wren
Born: 20 Oct 1632 in East Knoyle, Wiltshire, England
Died: 25 Feb 1723 in London, England
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Wren is best known as an architect, but his interests also included geometry and astronomy
Wren attended Westminster School, London. He entered Wadham College, Oxford in 1649 and received an M.A. from Oxford in 1653. In 1657 he became professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London.
Wren became Savile Professor of Astronomy at Oxford in 1661 and held this post until 1673. His interests proved to be architecture and geometry as well as astronomy.
In 1663 he designed the chapel at Pembroke College, Cambridge; in 1664, the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford; and in 1665, buildings for Trinity College, Oxford.
His greatest opportunity in architecture came with the rebuilding that followed the London fire of 1666. He replanned the entire city and supervised the rebuilding of 51 churches. His most famous design was that of Saint Paul's Cathedral.
Although he is known today almost exclusively for his architectural achievement Wren was a very famous mathematician in his own day. Newton, never one to give excessive praise to others, states in the Principia that he ranks Wren together with Wallis and Huygens as the leading geometers of the day.
Wren's fame in mathematics resulted from results he obtained in 1658. He found the length of an arc of the cycloid using an exhaustion proof based on disections to reduce the problem to summing segments of chords of a circle which are in geometric progression.
He was the first to resolve Kepler's Problem on cutting a semicircle in a given ratio by a line through a given point on its diameter. This problem had arisen in Kepler's work on elliptical orbits. Wren independently proved Kepler's third law and formulated the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction.
Another topic to which Wren contributed was optics. He published a description of a machine to create perspective drawings and he discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors. Out of this work came another of Wren's important results, namely that the hyperboloid of revolution is a ruled surface. These results were published in 1669.
Other work on the logarithmic spiral, which had been rectified by Wallis in the late 1650s, led Wren to note that it was possible to consider an area preserving transformation which would transform a cone into a solid logarithmic spiral which, he remarked, resembled snail shapes and sea shell shapes. D'Arcy Thompson was to examine such ideas 250 years later.
Wren was the leader of a scientific discussion group at Gresham College London that, in 1660, initiated formal weekly meetings. In 1662 this body received its Royal Charter from Charles II and 'The Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge' was formed. Wren was president of the Royal Society from 1680 to 1682.
References elsewhere in this archive:
Tell me about Wren's work on orbits
Tell me about Kepler's third law
Wren was one of several mathematicians who worked on the Cycloid curve and the Logarithmic Spiral.
Other Web sites:
References:
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