ABSTRACT
Wrote on optics (1669) and published editions of Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes, and Theodosius. His forceful sermons and tracts occupy nine volumes in an edition published in 1859. A leading scholar and Royalist, Barrow graduated B.A. (1648) and M.A. (1652) from Trinity College, Cambridge. Elected Fellow in 1649, by 1655, during the Commonwealth, he was persuaded to leave Cambridge to go on his travels, which took him through Europe to Turkey. Returning in 1659, at the Restoration of the Monarchy (1660), he obtained the chair in Greek, which he had earlier been denied. In 1662 he added the Gresham Chair of Geometry (London) and Fellowship of the new Royal Society. In 1663 he became the first holder of the new Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, but he resigned it in 1669 in favor of Isaac Newton (who, although not his pupil, was often his protégé) to become royal chaplain in London. The king mandated his D.D. (1670) and appointed him Master of Trinity College in 1673. Himself the nephew of a bishop, Barrow probably expected similar elevation, but he died suddenly, seemingly of a medicinal overdose.
