William Brouncker MD Viscount Castlelyons (c 1620–84) First President of the Royal Society

Abstract

William Brouncker was the grandson of Sir Henry Brouncker, President of Munster during the Elizabethan Plantation of Ireland in the 16th century. William's date and place of birth are uncertain; he was born about 1620, most probably at Castlelyons, County Cork, and educated at Oxford where he shone in mathematics and languages. Until his death in 1684 he served the Stuarts as a senior member of the Navy Board from which sprang the Admiralty, and we owe much of what we know about his life to the warts-and-all diary of his younger naval colleague, Samuel Pepys (1633–1703). Although William was granted a doctorate in medicine by Oxford in 1646, music and mathematics were his major interests. He was the first President of the Royal Society and he held that position from 1662 to 1677, when his tenure was brought to a reluctant close by an election, sardonically recorded in the diary of the curator of experiments, Robert Hooke (1635–1703). If Brouncker did not add any empirical facts, he certainly contributed to the promotion and dissemination of natural knowledge.