Gresham College

Gresham College is an establishment of higher education of the district of Holborn in the center of London. It does not register students and does not deliver any Diplôme: one can look it like an English equivalent of the Collège de France.

Gresham College delivers public and free conferences since its foundation, in accordance with the Testament of Sir Thomas Gresham in 1597, a long time before a Université comes to be established in London - if one excludes the imitation-university of the Inns off Short.

History

Gresham bequeathed its goods for half to the Corporation of the merchants of London and to the Guilde of the Drapers ( Mercers' Company ), with load for them to act through a named institution Joint Large Gresham Committee chaired by the Lord Mayor of London. The will of Gresham had that a college would be created in its manor of the district of Bishopsgate (with the site occupied today by the Tower 42 , the old building of the National Westminster), and equipped the institution with the incomes the trade that Gresham had established all around London Stock Exchange.

The immediate success of the college made it incorporate in the Royal Society in 1663, which settled in its buildings of Bishopsgate before joining its final seat with Short Crane in 1710. Gresham College remained in the Hotel Gresham de Bishopsgate until in 1768, then moved at various places of the capital until construction, in 1842, of its current buildings in Gresham Street (postal district EC2). In spite of a close cooperation between Gresham College and the University of London (created with the XIXe century) continued during several decades, the two institutions finally did not amalgamate. Since 1991, Gresham College is installed with Barnard' S Inn Hall (Holborn EC1).

Professors

The seven primitive pulpits of Gresham College, namely Théologie, Musique, Astronomie, Géométrie, physical (i.e. of Médecine), Droit and Rhétorique were the reflection of the medieval university course (Trivium and Quadrivium); but as a platform for the public novel ideas and conferences, the college played a leading role in the creation of the Royal Society like in the propagation of the ideas of the Lumières. Among his famous professors, one finds the architect Christopher Wren, who gave conferences of astronomy to the XVIIe century, the inventor of the decimal Logarithme S Henry Briggs and the physicist Robert Hooke.

The professors touched salaries of £50 per annum, and the content of their courses was strongly framed, as the extract of the payment indicates it hereafter:

the geometrician will teach according to the following provisions: from April at June ( Trinity term ) the arithmetic one, from October at December ( Michaelmas and Hilary term ) theoretical geometry, and from January to April ( Easter term ) practical geometry. The reader of astronomy will expose in his public conferences, initially the principles of the sphere, and the theoretical one of planets, the use of the astrolabe, the stick of Jacob, and other instruments for the instruction of the sailors .

Nowadays, the professors preserve their title for one three years duration, and an eighth pulpit, that of economy, was associated with the seven first in 1985. Since 2000, the college regularly invites professors external at the institution to expose their own research; it from time to time shelters seminars of research and conferences.

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