Smith, ROBERT

Smith, ROBERT, whose name lives in the Smith's Prizes at Cambridge, was born in 1689, and was cousin to the mathematician Roger Cotes, whom he succeeded as Plunian professor of Astronomy at Cambridge in 1716. He succeeded Bentley as master of Trinity College in 1742, published Harmonia Mensurarum (1722), A Complete System of Optics (1738), and Harmonics, or the Philosophy of Musical Sounds (1748), edited the Lectures on Hydrostatics and Pneumatics of Cotes in 1737, and died at Cambridge in 1768.—The two Smith Prizes, now amounting to about £23 each, are, by a Grace of October 1883, awarded annually for the essays of greatest merit on any subject in mathematics or natural philosophy by recent B.A.'s. Holders have been Henry Martyn, J. Herschel, Whewell, Airy, Colenso, Stokes, Cayley, J. C. Adams, Lord Kelvin, Tait, and Clerk-Maxwell.