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Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygen
by bonoboTP 1y ago
Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish.
Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician.
Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.
- griffzhowl 1y agoThey were all educated at universities though.
- bonoboTP 1y agoYes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.
- analog31 1y agoIt could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.
- checker659 1y agoThe article doesn't say much about the role of religion in this matter. Surely what one could study was limited by what was allowed by the church.