The Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science is a chair at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. The chair was established in 1995 for the ethologist

Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an Oxford fellow, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Simonyi Professor for the Publ ...

by an endowment from

Charles Simonyi Charles Simonyi (; , ; born September 10, 1948) is a Hungarian Americans, Hungarian-American software architect. He introduced the graphical user interface to Bill Gates for the first time who later described it as the first of two revolutiona ...

. The aim of the Professorship is 'to communicate science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding'. It is a position that had been endowed by

with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.

History

Richard Dawkins explained the history of the creation of the chair in a chapter of his

memoir A memoir (; , ) is any nonfiction narrative writing based on the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autob ...

s, '' Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science''.

, '' Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science'', Bantam Press, 2015 (). Chapter "Simonyi Professor", pages 271-307. In 2008, Dawkins retired and the Oxford mathematician

Marcus du Sautoy Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy (; born 26 August 1965) is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and author of popular mathematics and popula ...

was elected to the chair.

List of Simonyi Professors

* 1995–2008:

, biological science * Since 2008:

, mathematical science

List of Simonyi Lectures

established an annual "Charles Simonyi Lecture" at the

. He invited the following speakers:

, '' Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science'', Bantam Press, 2015, page 282 ().The Simonyi Lectures

(page visited on 6 December 2015).

, second Simonyi Professor, invited:

Notes and references

Bibliography

, '' Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science'', Bantam Press, 2015 (). Chapter "Simonyi Professor", pages 271-307.

External links

*
''Charles Simonyi's manifesto''
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