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Sir Christopher Wren was born at Knoyle, Wiltshire, on October 20, 1632, and died in London on February 25, 1723. Wren's reputation as a mathematician has been overshadowed by his fame as an architect, but he was Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford from 1661 to 1673, and for some time president of the Royal Society. Together with Wallis and Huygens he investigated the laws of collision of bodies; he also discovered the two systems of generating lines on the hyperboloid of one sheet, though it is probable that he confined his attention to a hyperboloid of revolution. Besides these he wrote papers on the resistance of fluids, and the motion of the pendulum. He was a friend of Newton and (like Huygens, Hooke, Halley, and others) had made attempts to shew that the force under which the planets move varies inversely as the square of the distance from the sun.
Wallis, Brouncker, Wren, and Boyle (the last-named being a chemist and physicist rather than a mathematician) were the leading philosophers who founded the Royal Society of London. The society arose from the self-styled ``indivisible college'' in London in 1645; most of its members moved to Oxford during the civil war, where Hooke, who was then an assistant in Boyle's laboratory, joined in their meetings; the society was formally constituted in London in 1660, and was incorporated on July 15, 1662. The French Academy was founded in 1666, and the Berlin Academy in 1700. The Accademia dei Lincei was founded in 1603, but was dissolved in 1630.
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