Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke (; 18 July 16353 March 1703). Wikipedia follows the convention adopted by most modern historical writing of retaining the dates according to the Julian calendar but taking the year as starting on 1 January rather than 25 March. (According to the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of Europe, he was born on 28 July 1635 and died on 14 March 1703. The deviation between the calendars grew from ten to eleven days between his birth and his death because the Julian calendar had a 29 February 1700 but the Gregorian calendar did not. For a more detailed explanation, see Calendar (New Style) Act 1750.)}} was an English polymath, active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to explore living things at microscopic scale (in 1665), using a compound microscope that he designed. An impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood, he became one of the most important scientists of his day. As a surveyor and architect, he found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the property surveys after London's great fire of 1666 and assisting in the city's rapid reconstruction. In recent times, he has been called "England's Leonardo".

Hooke was a Fellow of the Royal Society and, from 1662, was its first Curator of Experiments. From 1665 to 1703, he was also Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. Beginning his scientific career as an assistant to physical scientist Robert Boyle, he built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's experiments on gas law, and himself conducted experiments. In 1664, he identified the rotations of the planets Mars and Jupiter. Hooke's 1665 book ''Micrographia'', in which he coined the term ''cell'', spurred microscopic investigations. Investigating in optics, specifically light refraction, he inferred a wave theory of light. His is the first recorded hypothesis of the cause of heat expanding matter, air's composition by small particles at larger distances, and heat as energy.

In physics, Hooke approximated experimental confirmation that gravity heeds an inverse square law and arguably was first to hypothesise such a relation in planetary motion, a principle furthered and formalised by Isaac Newton in Newton's law of universal gravitation. Priority over this insight contributed to the rivalry between Hooke and Newton. In geology and palaeontology, he originated the theory of a terraqueous globe, thus disputing the literally Biblical view of the Earth's age, hypothesised the extinction of species, and argued that hills and mountains had become elevated by geological processes. By identifying fossils of extinct species, he presaged the theory of biological evolution. Provided by Wikipedia