Robert Hooke, FRS (July 18, 1635 – March 3, 1703) was an English polymath who played an important role in the scientific revolution, through both experimental and theoretical work. His father's name was John Hooke and his mother unknown.

Born in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, Hooke received his early education at Westminster School. In 1653, Hooke won a place at Christ Church, Oxford. There he met the chemist (and physicist) Robert Boyle, and gained employment as his assistant. It is possible that Hooke formally stated Boyle's Law, as Boyle was not a mathematician. In 1660, he discovered Hooke's law of elasticity, which describes the linear variation of tension with extension in an elastic spring. In 1662, Hooke gained appointment as Curator of Experiments to the newly founded Royal Society, and took responsibility for experiments performed at its meetings. In 1665 he published a book entitled Micrographia, which contained a number of microscopic and telescopic observations, and some original biology. Indeed, Hooke coined the biological term cell -- so called because his observations of plant cells reminded him of monks' cells which were called "cellula". The hand-crafted, leather and gold-tooled microscope Hooke used to make these observations for "Micrographia," is on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC. Also in 1665 he gained appointment as Professor of Geometry at Gresham College.

Robert Hooke also achieved fame as Surveyor to the City of London and chief assistant of Christopher Wren, helping to rebuild London after the Great Fire in 1666. He worked on designing the Monument, Royal Greenwich Observatory and the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital (which became known as 'Bedlam').

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Journal of Mathematical Physics: All Topics

Dispersionful analog of the Whitham hierarchy
Blazej M. Szablikowski and Maciej Blaszak The transition from the zero-genus universal Whitham hierarchy to its dispersionful counterpart, making use only of the Lax representations, is presented. This is an alternative approach to that of Takasaki who has recently shown that the dispersionless limit of the charged multicomponent Kadomtsev- ... [J. Math. Phys. 49, 082701 (2008)] published Thu Aug 28, 2008.
Symplectic and multisymplectic Lobatto methods for the ``good'' Boussinesq equation
A. Aydin and B. Karasozen In this paper, we construct second order symplectic and multisymplectic integrators for the good Boussineq equation using the two-stage Lobatto IIIA-IIIB partitioned RungeKutta method, which yield an explicit scheme and is equivalent to the classical central difference approximation to the second or ... [J. Math. Phys. 49, 083509 (2008)] published Wed Aug 27, 2008.
Asymptotic counting of BPS operators in superconformal field theories
James Lucietti and Mukund Rangamani We consider some aspects of counting BPS operators which are annihilated by two supercharges in superconformal field theories. For nonzero coupling, the corresponding multivariable partition functions can be written in terms of generating functions for vector partitions or their weighted generalizat ... [J. Math. Phys. 49, 082301 (2008)] published Wed Aug 27, 2008.

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