St John's College, Cambridge

St John's College is one of the colleges making up the University of Cambridge, and was founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort in 1511. It is now Cambridge's second largest college by size of its membership, after Trinity College. It is one of the richest colleges with an estimated financial endowment of £225m and income of £7.6m (2003).

Famous alumni

Politics

• William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I of England for most of her reign
• Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Baron Fairfax of Cameron, English Civil War General and Commander-in-Chief
• George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, Prime Minister 1852-55
• Suematsu Kencho, politician, statesman, journalist, translator & historian
• Lord Palmerston, politician
• Frederick John Robinson, 1st Earl of Ripon, as 1st Viscount Goderich, Prime Minister 1827-28
• Dudley Ryder, 1st Earl of Harrowby, politician
• Sir Michael Scholar, former Permanent Secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry, now President of St John?s College Oxford
• Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India (2004-current)
• Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, politician
• Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, Prime Minister 1855-58 and 1859-65
• George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon, English diplomat and Statesman
• Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, Prime Minister 1765-66 and 1782
• Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, notable English Statesman during the reign of Charles I
• William Wilberforce, Member of Parliament who brought about the abolition of slavery in Britain in the 19th century

Science, mathematics, and technology

• John Couch Adams, mathematician and discoverer of Neptune
• Sir Edward Appleton, winner of the Nobel prize for Physics, for discovering the Appleton layer
• George Barnard, statistician known for his work on the foundations of statistics.
• Sir John Cockcroft KCB, Nobel prize-winning physicist who first split the atom
• Allan Cormack, Nobel laureate in Medicine or Physiology for the invention of the CAT scan
• John Dee, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I
• Paul Dirac, Nobel prize-winning physicist and one of the founding fathers of Quantum Mechanics
• William Heberden, British physician who gave the first clinical description (1768) of angina pectoris and demonstrated that chicken pox was different from smallpox
• John Herschel, mathematician and astronomer
• Fred Hoyle, pioneering but controversial cosmologist who first used the term 'Big Bang'.
• Sir Harold Jeffreys, applied mathematician and geophysicist
• Joseph Larmor, mathematician and physicist
• Alfred Marshall, economist
• Nevill Francis Mott, awarded Nobel prize for Physics for work on the behaviour of electrons in magnetic solids
• Sir Roger Penrose, mathematical physicist and philosopher
• Abdus Salam, Nobel laureate in Physics for unifying the electromagnetic force and the weak force
• Frederick Sanger, molecular biologist and one of only four double Nobel Prize winners
• James Joseph Sylvester, mathematician
• Brook Taylor, mathematician
• Sir Maurice Wilkes, one of the founding fathers of modern computer science
• Maurice Wilkins, awarded Nobel prize for Medicine or Physiology with Watson and Crick for discovering the structure of DNA

Literature

• Douglas Adams, author
• Samuel Butler (1835-1902), author
• William Wordsworth, poet

Other

• Cecil Beaton, photographer (never graduated)
• Chris Brasher, Olympic gold medallist runner; founder of the London Marathon
• Kikuchi Dairoku, the first Japanese graduate of Cambridge University
• Andrew Gilligan, controversial journalist
• Herbert Howells, English composer; held the post of college organist during WWII.
• Derek Jacobi, actor
• Donald MacAlister, physician and academic
• Jonathan Miller, physician, theatre and opera director and television presenter
• Kenneth Thomson of Canada's wealthiest family and Thomson Corp. (information services)