University of Oxford notable alumni

University of Oxford notable alumni

 

University of Oxford notable alumni

• Other Names: Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford.
• Type: Public Research University Ancient University.
• Established: c. 1096; 926 years ago.
• Chancellor: Lord Patten of Barnes
• Vice-Chancellor: Lewis Richardson.
• Academic staff: 6,995 (2020).
• Students: 24,515 (2019).
• Graduates: 11,955.
• Postgraduate: 12,010.
• Other students: 541 (2017).
• Location: Oxford, England.

When was Oxford established?

Oxford, England, the father of Oxford University (English University) is believed to have started touring the university in the late 11th century or early 12th century. Oxford is currently recognized as one of the best universities in the world.

Famous student

Stephen William Hawking was a student at Oxford University

Alumni of the University of Oxford are called Oxonians.

Many famous personalities have studied at Oxford University. So far, at least 4 English kings, 8 foreign kings, 47 Nobel laureates, 25 British prime ministers, 28 foreign presidents, and prime ministers, 7 saints, 18 cardinals, and one pope have been students at the university. Among them are – John Wesley, Oscar Wilde, Cecil Rhodes, Edmund Halley, Stephen Hawking, Tim Berners-Lee, Hugh Grant, Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher, and others.

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University of Oxford notable alumni

Throughout its history, a significant number of Oxford alumni, known as Oxonians, have become notable in many diverse fields, academic and otherwise. A total of 70 Nobel laureates have studied or taught at Oxford, winning prizes in all six categories. More information about notable members of the university can be found in individual college articles. An individual may be associated with two or more colleges as an undergraduate, postgraduate, and/or staff member.

Politics

29 British Prime Ministers have attended Oxford, including William Gladstone, H H Asquith, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss. Of all the post-war prime ministers, only Gordon Brown was educated at a university other than Oxford (University of Edinburgh). At the same time, Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, and John Major never attended a university. In 2010 over 100 Oxford alumni were elected to the House of Commons These include the former Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, and numerous members of the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet Additionally, over 140 Oxonians sit in the House of Lords.

International leaders studying at Oxford University

At least 30 international leaders have been educated at Oxford. This number includes Harald V of Norway, Abdullah II of Jordan, William II of the Netherlands, five Prime Ministers of Australia (John Gorton, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull), six Prime Ministers of Pakistan (Liaquat Ali) Khan, Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, Sir Feroze Khan Noon, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, and Imran Khan), two Prime Ministers of Canada (Lester B. Pearson and John Turner), two Prime Ministers of India (Manmohan Singh and Indira Gandhi, although the latter did not complete her degree), Prime Minister of Ceylon ( S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike), Norman Washington Manley of Jamaica,[190] Haitham bin Tariq Al Said (Sultan of Oman) Eric Williams (Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago), Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (former President of Peru), Abhijit Vejjajiva (of Thailand former Prime Minister), and Bill Clinton (the first President of the United States to attend Oxford; he attended as a Rhodes Scholar). Arthur Mutambara (Deputy Prime Minister of Zimbabwe), was a Rhodes Scholar in 1991. Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana, spent a year at Balliol College. Festus Mogae (former president of Botswana) was a student at University College. Burmese democracy activist and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was a student at St. Hugh’s College. Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, the current reigning Druk Gyalpo (Dragon King) of Bhutan, was a member of Magdalen College. Malala Yousafzai, the world’s youngest Nobel laureate, completed her BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

law

Oxford has produced a large number of eminent jurists, judges, and lawyers from around the world. Lords Bingham and Denning, generally recognized as the two most influential English judges in the history of the common law, both studied at Oxford. Within the UK, three of the current Supreme Court justices are Oxford-educated: Robert Reid (Deputy President of the Supreme Court), Nicholas Wilson, and Michael Briggs; Retired judges include David Neuberger (President of the Supreme Court 2012–2017), Jonathan Manns (Deputy President of the Supreme Court 2017–2018), Alan Rodger, Jonathan Sumption, Mark Saville, John Dyson, and Simon Brown. Twelve Lord Chancellors and nine Chief Justices educated at Oxford include Thomas Bingham,[196] Stanley Buckmaster, Thomas More, Thomas Wolsey, and Gavin Simmonds. Twenty-two Law Lords including Leonard Hoffman, Kenneth Diplock, Richard Wilberforce, James Atkin, Simon Brown, Nicholas Brown-Wilkinson, Robert Gough, Brian Hutton, Jonathan Mance, Alan Rodger, Mark Saville, Leslie Scarman, Johan Stein; The Master of the Rolls includes Alfred Denning and Wilfred Greene; The Lord Justices of Appeal include John Law, Brian Leveson, and John Mummery. British Attorney General Dominic Grieve, Nicholas Lyell, Patrick Mayhew, John Hobson, Reginald Manningham-Buller, Lionel Heald, Frank Soskis, David Maxwell Fife, Donald Somervell, William Jowitt; Directors of Public Prosecutions include Sir Thomas Hetherington QC, Dame Barbara Mills QC, and Sir Keir Starmer QC.

In the United States, three of the nine current Supreme Court justices are Oxonians, namely Stephen Breyer,[205] Elena Kagan,[206] and Neil Gorsuch; Among the retired justices are John Marshall Harlan II, David Souter, and Byron White. Internationally, Oxonian Sir Humphrey Waldock served on the International Court of Justice; Akua Kuehia, sits on the International Criminal Court; Sir Nicholas Bratza and Paul Mahoney sat at the European Court of Human Rights; Kenneth Hayne, Dyson Haydon, as well as Patrick Keane, sat on the High Court of Australia; Kailas Nath Wanchu, A.N. Both Roy served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India; Cornelia Sorabji, the first female law student at Oxford, was India’s first female lawyer; In Hong Kong, Arif Barma, Thomas Au and Doreen Le Pichon currently serve on the Court of Appeal (Hong Kong), while Charles Ching and Henry Litton have both served as permanent judges of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong; Laurie Ackerman and Edwin Cameron served on the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Six Poisson Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada and one Chief Justice of the now-defunct Federal Court of Canada were also educated at Oxford.

Prominent jurists include HLA Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Andrew Burroughs, Sir Guenter Trittel, Jeremy Waldron, AV DC, William Blackstone, John Gardner, Robert A. Gorman, Timothy Endicott, Peter Burks, John Finnis, Andrew Ashworth, Joseph. Raj, Paul Craig, Leslie Green, Tony Honor, Neil McCormick, and Hugh Collins. Other prominent practitioners attending Oxford include Lord Panick QC, Geoffrey Robertson QC, Amal Clooney, Lord Fox QC, and Dina Rose QC.

Mathematics and Science

Four Oxford mathematicians, Michael Atiyah, Daniel Quillen, Simon Donaldson, and James Maynard won the Fields Medal, often called the “Nobel Prize for Mathematics”. Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat’s last theorem, was educated at Oxford and is currently a Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and a Royal Society Research Professor. Marcus du Sautoy and Roger Penrose are both now professors of mathematics, and Jackie Stedal was a university professor. Stephen Wolfram, chief designer of Mathematica and studied at Wolfram Alpha University, along with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Edgar F. Codd, inventor of the relational model of data, and Tony Hoare, programming language pioneer, and inventor of QuickSort.

The university is associated with eleven winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, six in Physics, and sixteen in Medicine.

Scientists researching at Oxford include the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, who received the Nobel Prize for “the determination by X-ray techniques of the structure of important biochemical substances, their curative effects in various infectious diseases”, and John B. Goodenough, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Richard Dawkins and Frederick Soddy studied at the university and returned for research. Robert Hooke, Edwin Hubble, and Stephen Hawking All studied at Oxford.

Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, never formally studied or held a position at a university, but lived in the city to be part of the scientific community and received an honorary degree. Notable scientists who briefly spent time at Oxford included Albert Einstein who developed the theory of general relativity and the concept of the photon and Erwin Schrödinger who formulated the Schrödinger equation and Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Structural engineer Roma Agarwal, responsible for London’s Shard, attributes her love of engineering to a summer placement during her undergraduate physics degree at Oxford.

Economists Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, EF Schumacher, and Amartya Sen have all spent time at Oxford.

Literature, Music, and Drama

Authors associated with Oxford include Vera Brittain, A.S. Byatt, Lewis Carroll, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Fowles, Theodor Geisel, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, Christopher Hitchens, Aldous Huxley, Samuel Johnson, Nicole Krause, CS Lewis, Thomas Middleton, Iris Murdoch, VS. Naipaul, Philip Pullman, Dorothy L. Sayers, Vikram Seth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Donne, A.E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, WH Auden, TS Luck, and Seven Poets. Winners: Thomas Wharton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, Robert Bridges, Cecil Day-Lewis, Sir John Betjeman, and Andrew Motion.

Composers Hubert Parry, George Butterworth, John Taverner, William Walton, James Whitbourne, and Andrew Lloyd Webber are all associated with the university.

The actor studied at Oxford University

Actors Hugh Grant, Kate Beckinsale, Rosamund Pike, Felicity Jones, Gemma Chan, Dudley Moore, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Anna Popplewell, and Rowan Atkinson were university students, filmmakers Ken Loach and Richard Curtis.

Religion

Oxford has produced at least 12 saints, 19 English cardinals, and 20 Archbishops of Canterbury, the most recent Archbishop being Rowan Williams, who studied at Wadham College and was later a canon professor at Christ Church. Dans Scotus’ teaching is commemorated with a monument in St. Mary’s University Church. The religious reformer John Wycliffe was an Oxford scholar, for a time Master of Balliol College. John Collett, Christian humanist, Dean of St Paul’s, and friend of Erasmus, studied at Magdalen College. Several Caroline Devines, notably William Laud as president and chancellor of the university at St John’s, and non-jurors, such as Thomas Kane, had close connections to Oxford. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, studied at Christ Church and was elected a Fellow of Lincoln College. Britain’s first woman to be an ordained minister, Constance Coltman, attended Somerville College. The Oxford Movement (1833–1846) was closely associated with Oriel Fellows John Henry Newman, Edward Boveri Pusey, and John Cable. Other religious figures are Mirza Nasir Ahmad, the third caliph of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, Shoghi Effendi, an ordained leader of the Baha’i faith, and Joseph Cordeiro, the first Pakistani Catholic cardinal.

philosophy

Oxford’s philosophical tradition dates back to the Middle Ages, with Robert Grosseteste and William of Ockham, commonly known for Occam’s Razor, teaching at the university. Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, and the empiricist John Locke received degrees from Oxford. Although the latter’s major works were written after leaving Oxford, Locke was heavily influenced by his twelve years at the university.

Oxford philosophers of the 20th century include Richard Swinburne, a leading philosopher in the tradition of substance dualism; Peter Hacker, philosopher of mind, language, and anthropology and also known for his critique of cognitive neuroscience; J.L. Austin, a leading proponent of common-language philosophy; Gilbert Ryle, author of The Concept of Mind; and Derek Parfitt, who specializes in personal identity. Other commonly read modern philosophers who studied at the university include A.J. Ayer, Elizabeth Anscombe, Paul Grice, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, Robert Nozick, Onora O’Neill, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and Peter Singer. The presenter of the Chinese Room thought experiment studied at John Searle University and began his academic career. Similarly, Philippa Foote, who mentioned the trolley problem, studied and taught at Somerville College.

Sports

Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister, who was at Exeter College and Merton College, ran Oxford’s first sub-four-minute mile.

Around 150 Olympic medal-winners have academic links to the university, including Sir Matthew Pinsent, a four-time gold medal-winning rower.

Those from Oxford who have won Olympic or World Championship gold include Michael Blomqvist, Ed Cloud, Chris David, Hugh Edwards, Jason Flickinger, Tim Foster, Luca Gruber, Christopher Lewski, Matthew Pinsent, Pete Reid, Johnny Searle, Andrew Triggs Hodge. , Jake Wetzel, Michael Wherley, and Barney Williams. Many Oxford graduates have also risen to cricket’s highest ranks: Harry Altham, Bernard Bosanquet (inventor of Google), Colin Cowdrey, Gerry Crutchley, Jamie Dalrymple, Martin Donnelly, R.E. Foster (the only person to have captained England in both cricket and football), C.B. Fry, George Harris (also served in the House of Lords), Douglas Jardine, Malcolm Jardine, Imran Khan (later Prime Minister of Pakistan), Sophie Le Marchand, Alan Melville, Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, M.J.K. Smith and Pelham Warner.

Oxford students have also excelled in other sports. Such alumni include American football player Myron Rolle (NFL player); Olympic gold medalists David Hemery and Jack Lovelock in athletics; basketball players Bill Bradley (US senator, NBA player, and Olympic gold medalist) and Charles Thomas McMillen (US congressman, NBA player, and Olympic silver medalist); figure skater John Misha Petkevich (national champion); footballers John Bain, Charles Rayford-Brown and Cuthbert Otway; fencer Alan Jay (world champion and five-time Olympian); modern pentathlete Steph Cook (Olympic gold medalist); rugby footballers Stuart Burns, Simon Danieli, David Humphreys, David Edward Kirk, Anton Oliver, Ronald Poulton-Palmer, Joe Rough and William Webb Ellis (supposedly the inventor of rugby football); World Cup freestyle skier Ryan Max Riley (national champion); polo player Claire Tomlinson (highest-ranked woman in the world); and tennis player Clarence Bruce.

Adventure and exploration

 

Three well-known explorers and explorers who attended Oxford were Walter Raleigh, one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan era; T.E. Lawrence, whose life was based on the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia; and Thomas Coriat. The latter, “Coryat’s Crudities hustle gobbled up in Five Months Travels in France, Italy, &c” (1611), and Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales’ court jester, is credited with introducing table forks and umbrellas to England. The first Briton to undertake the Grand Tour of Europe.

Other notable figures include Gertrude Bell, an explorer, archaeologist, mapper, and spy, who led T.E. Along with Lawrence, helped establish the Hashemite dynasty in present-day Jordan and Iraq, and played a major role in establishing and governing the modern state of Iraq; Richard Francis Burton, who traveled to Mecca in disguise and traveled with John Hanning Speke as the first European explorer to visit Africa’s Great Lakes in search of the source of the Nile; anthropologist Catherine Routledge, who conducted the first survey of Easter Island; Mountaineer Tom Bourdillon, member of the first expedition to climb Mount Everest; and Peter Fleming, adventure and travel writer and older brother of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.