3 ms·

Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, surely?

• jerf 13y ago
  Your question intrigued me. You are literally correct, but as it turns out the position since 1849 has been held by a physicist (at least, if we include one 10-year term of someone specializing in what Wikipedia called a "fluid mechanics" specialty "physics"), so as an imprecise conversational term it's not entirely wrong. I was unable to turn up the original source of the quote in Google, but odds are quite good it was written prior to 2009 (and almost certainly post-1979, as the timeline theoretically works for that but it would be amazing prescient in that time :) ), in which case the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge was Stephen Hawking.