The people behind the equations: Robert Hooke

If you’ve taken a first year physics course in your time at this university you’ve probably become acquainted with Hooke’s law. If you are in a program with the grave misfortune of having a mandatory statics class, you are sure to remember this as the most confusing three-variable equation you have ever encountered. For the luckier among us, Hooke’s law states that the strain of a spring or solid object is proportional to the applied stress, σ=Eε. (There being a slightly different equation for springs.) And somehow, this equation can predict everything from how much a rope stretches to the internal loadings of a curtain rod. It can also, apparently, revolutionize the field of timekeeping.

Robert Hooke was born in 1635 in England and lived to the grand age of 67. In his years, he left behind a long legacy of academic merit and scientific discovery. Hooke started his career at Oxford, where he worked under famed natural scientist and philosopher Robert Boyle. In 1665, Hooke was named Curator of Office of the recently-formed Royal Society. During his life, he was responsible for many discoveries and scientific advances including: doing much of the mathematics for Boyle’s law, coining the biological term “cell,” and of course Hooke’s Law. But perhaps his greatest achievement was the development of a watch which, thanks to the use of a spring to keep more accurate time, would have solved one of the apex problems of the day; how to determine longitude while at sea. The credit for this invention goes to one of Hooke’s colleagues, Christiaan Huygens, but it is though that Hooke’s invention came 15 years earlier; unable to fund the patent, and secretive and jealous of other his fellow thinkers—typical for the time—Hooke hid his invention and allowed it to fade into obscurity.

Let’s all take a moment, every time we check our watches, to remember this great champion of science. He may be known now for squeezing springs together and recording how much they compress, but he truly is a man deserving the honour of being immortalized by an equation.