Fine Clothing
THE SEASON IS CHANGING,
SO SHOULD YOUR SHIRTS.
beaufortandblake.comAUTUMN WINTER 17There were more shenanigans in the 1890s,
when the professor of geometry Karl
Pearson illustrated his lectures on the laws
of chance by scattering 10,000 pennies
across the floor.
By then the college had moved to new
premises. They’ve since moved again, to
Barnard’s Inn Hall, a 14th-century gem near
Chancery Lane. Some of the bigger lectures
take place at the Museum of London, while
more than 2,000 have been recorded and
are available to watch on the college’s web-
site. I love the thought of Thomas Gresh-
am coming back to see his dream of wider
learning fulfilled on such a scale.
So how many people do have to gath-
er together for a 51 per cent probability
of a shared birthday? It’s just 23. Count-
er-intuitive, I know, but think of it this way.
You’re the first person in the room. The sec-
ond person to enter has a 1 in 365 chance
of sharing your birthday. So does the third
person, making it 2 in 365. But there’s also
the chance they could share each other’s
birthday. Imagine those three possibilities
as the three sides of a triangle. When you
get to four people there are the four sides of
a square, plus the diagonals. Now imagine a
23-sided shape, with every point joined to
every other point. The possibilities sudden-
ly seem a lot larger than you assumed...H
ow many people need to gather
together before it becomes more
likely than not that at least two of
them will share a birthday? The answer
might surprise you. It’s just one of the many
intriguing facts that I’ve learned at Gresh-
am College.
Gresham was founded in 1597, the
brainchild of Thomas Gresham, king of
what’s now called the Square Mile. He had
also established the Royal Exchange, and
decreed that rents paid by merchants there
should fund free lectures open to anyone.
The arrangement continues to this day. No
need to enrol or book: anyone can turn up
at any lecture that takes their fancy. So next
time you buy a Paul Smith T-shirt or Tiffany
ring at the Exchange, congratulate yourself
on your contribution to public learning.
The logos of both institutions feature a
grasshopper: this was Gresham’s emblem.
One of his ancestors was abandoned in the
countryside as a newborn baby, and was only
discovered when a boy chased a grasshopper
into the field. Gresham knew that without
that insect he would never have existed.
From the start, lectures were delivered in
English as well as Latin (Oxford and Cam-
bridge used only the latter). Gresham also
led its more famous cousins in having pro-
fessors of geometry and astronomy; an earlyoccupant of the second post was Christo-
pher Wren. In 1660 the college gave birth
to the Royal Society, which meant that, for
a while, the Society’s members were known
as ‘Greshamites’. Samuel Pepys attended a
1666 lecture at which one of the first-ever
blood transfusions occurred. ‘There was a
pretty experiment of the blood of one dog
let out, till he died, into the body of another
on one side, while all his own run out on the
other side,’ he wrote. ‘The first died upon
the place, and the other very well, and likely
to do well.’
At that time, professors lived in the
college (then sited on Bishopsgate). Rob-
ert Hooke knocked a hole in his roof
so he could stick a telescope through it.School of thought: the site of the fi rst
college in BishopsgateNOTES ON ...
Gresham College
By Mark Mason
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