Winners of the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London

... a medal or other honorary prize should be bestowed on the person whose experiment should be best approved...

In 1736 to was agreed to award a medal to the value of £5 either for the most important scientific discovery or for the greatest contribution made by experiment. In 1831 the conditions were changed again so that it was awarded to the author of the research that the Council of the Society decided was the most deserving the honour.

In 1881 Sir Joseph Copley donated £1666 13s. 4d. so that the interest would pay £50 per year to cover the costs of the Copley Medal.

The Copley Medal is awarded for scientific work in any field so the list we give has been restricted to those whose biographies appear in this Archive.

The winners of the medals are given below.

1746 Benjamin Robins 1753 Benjamin Franklin 1775 Nevil Maskelyne 1778 Charles Hutton 1784 Edward Waring 1795 Jesse Ramsden 1796 George Atwood 1809 Edward Troughton 1814 James Ivory 1821 John Herschel 1825 Francois Arago 1825 Peter Barlow 1831 George Airy 1832 Siméon Poisson 1834 Giovanni Plana 1838 Karl Gauss 1840 Charles-Francois Sturm 1841 George Ohm 1842 James MacCullagh 1846 Urbain Le Verrier 1847 John Herschel

1848 John Couch Adams 1859 Wilhelm Weber 1865 Michel Chasles 1866 Julius Plücker 1873 Hermann Helmholtz 1879 Rudolf Clausius 1880 James Sylvester 1882 Arthur Cayley 1883 William Thomson 1886 Franz Neumann 1889 George Salmon 1890 Simon Newcomb 1893 George Stokes 1895 Carl Weierstrass 1899 Lord Rayleigh 1901 Joseph Willard Gibbs 1909 George William Hill 1910 Francis Galton 1911 George Howard Darwin 1912 Felix Klein 1918 Hendrik Lorentz

1921 Joseph Larmor 1923 Horace Lamb 1925 Albert Einstein 1929 Max Planck 1938 Niels Bohr 1944 Geoffrey Taylor 1947 Godfrey H Hardy 1952 Paul A M Dirac 1954 Edmund T Whittaker 1955 Ronald A Fisher 1958 John E Littlewood 1960 Harold Jeffreys 1964 Sydney Chapman 1974 William V D Hodge 1984 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar 1988 Michael F Atiyah 1998 James Lighthill 2002 John Pople 2006 Stephen Hawking 2008 Roger Penrose

MacTutor links:

Royal Society of London
History of the Royal Society
Fellows of the Royal Society
Presidents of the Royal Society

Royal Society Prizes etc:

Royal Medal
Sylvester Medal
Copley Medal
Bakerian Lectures

Other Web site:

Royal Society Web site

The URL of this page is:
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Societies/CopleyMedal.html >