Wrangler (University of Cambridge)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Wrangler (disambiguation).
At the University of Cambridge, a wrangler is a student who has completed the third year (called Part II) of the Mathematical Tripos with first-class honours.
The highest-scoring student is named the "senior wrangler"; the second highest-scoring student is the "second wrangler"; the third highest is the "third wrangler", and so on.
In contrast to the senior wrangler, the person who achieved the lowest exam marks, but still earned a third-class degree, is known as the wooden spoon.
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[edit] Past wranglers
Senior wranglers have included some of Britain's most brilliant mathematicians and scientists, including John Herschel, Arthur Cayley, George Gabriel Stokes, Lord Rayleigh and J. E. Littlewood. John Couch Adams scored so well that there was a greater gap between him and the second wrangler than between the second wrangler and the wooden spoon.
Interestingly, there are some equally if not more famous names associated with the rank of second wrangler (such as James Clerk Maxwell, J.J. Thomson and Lord Kelvin). Legend has it that Kelvin was so confident that he had come top of the exam that he asked his servant to run to the Senate House and check who the second wrangler was. The servant returned and informed him, "You, sir"! It is also suggested that the final exam required the students to write a proof of a theorem which Kelvin himself had provided the proof for, earlier in the course; unfortunately, because he had created it, it hadn't occurred to him to learn it, and he spent a lot of time working it out from scratch - while the student who achieved Senior Wrangler put it down to having committed the proof to memory.
There has long been a culture of fierce competition at mathematics exams at Cambridge. However, it is certainly not true to say that top marks in the Cambridge mathematics exam guaranteed the senior wrangler success in life; the exams were largely a test of speed in applying familiar rules, and some of the most inventive and original students of Mathematics at Cambridge did not come top of their class (Hardy was 4th, Sedgwick 5th, Malthus was 9th and Keynes was 12th) and some fared even worse (Klaus Roth was not even a wrangler).
The first woman to top the mathematics list, albeit unofficially, was Philippa Fawcett, who took the exams in 1890. At the time, women were not officially ranked, although they were told how they had done compared to the male candidates, so she was ranked "above the senior wrangler".
The examination was the most important in Britain at the time, and the results were given great publicity. In 1865 Lord Rayleigh was senior wrangler, and The Times of 30 January printed a story asserting that he had not gained this distinction through favouritism as heir to a peerage!
In the early 20th century, the order of merit was abolished and lists of students who had completed the mathematics exams were sorted alphabetically in each of the three classes of honours, and were not based on individual marks. The last official senior wrangler was P. J. Daniell, who graduated in 1909.
Students who achieve second-class and third-class mathematics degrees are known as Senior Optimes (second-class) and Junior Optimes (third-class). Cambridge did not divide its examination classification in mathematics into 2:1s and 2:2s until 1995 but now there are Senior Optimes Division 1 and Senior Optimes Division 2.
[edit] Sources
The story about Rayleigh comes from
- Peter Groenewegen (2003). A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842-1924. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. ISBN 1-85898-151-4.
Alfred Marshall was the commoner who came second to Rayleigh.
- D. O., Forfar ‘What became of the senior wranglers?’, Mathematical spectrum 29 (1996/7), 1-4.
Survey of the subsequent careers of senior wranglers during the 157 years (1753-1909) in which the results of Cambridge’s mathematical tripos was published in order of merit.
There is a very thorough account of the Cambridge system in the 19th century in
- Andrew Warwick (2003) Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87374-9
Appendix A lists the top 10 wranglers from 1865 to 1909 with their coaches and their colleges.
[edit] External links
Information on the wranglers in the period 1860-1940 can be extracted from the BritMath database
Many of the wranglers who made careers in mathematics can be identified by searching on "wrangler" in
[edit] See also
- Donald MacAlister, Senior Wrangler in 1877. MacAlister was one of the many wranglers who achieved distinction outside of mathematics. The postcard portrait was part of the cult of celebrity surrounding the senior wrangler.
- 'The Senior Wrangler' is a member of the faculty of Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of novels
