Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke was an English polymath, active as a physicist, astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect, who lived from 1635 to 1703. He began his scientific career as an assistant to Robert Boyle, and he built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's gas law experiments, developing an air pump of his own because he judged an earlier pump too gross for the work. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and from 1662 its first Curator of Experiments, and from 1665 he was also Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. Among his hypotheses are the cause of the expansion of matter by heat, the composition of air from small particles in constant motion that generate its pressure, and heat as energy. The page also records that Hooke did not influence Thomas Newcomen's invention of the steam engine, a long repeated myth.