Membership of the Philosophical Society is open to graduates of the University of Cambridge, and graduates of other universities who at the time of application are resident in or near Cambridge. Members are also known as Fellows. In order to be elected a Fellow of the Society, a person must be recommended by a proposer (who must have been a Fellow for at least three years) and by a supporter (who knows the candidate in a professional capacity). The supporter is to be a person of appropriate standing (e.g. academic staff member in the place of work of the applicant). They do not have to be a member of the Society, but must know the applicant personally. As an example of how to identify a supporter and a proposer, PhD students would be expected to liaise with their PhD Supervisor and enquire at postgraduate offices within their Department and College. When all other avenues have been explored, applicants are welcome to contact the Society Office for advice. Approved candidates are elected at open meetings of the Society.
Completed membership application forms should be submitted with electronic signatures by a .pdf attachment to the Society’s email at philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk. The proposer and the supporter must be copied in the email when submitting your membership application form to validate their signatures.
The completed application form should be accompanied by confirmation of payment of your first annual subscription. On election as a Fellow of the Society, your membership will be endorsed as having commenced on the date of your first payment. In the case of an unsuccessful application the payment will be returned.
Subscriptions are invited by a bank transfer to the Society's bank account: please refer to the Subscription form below for bank details. To validate your payment, please send an email to philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk advising when you paid and the reference you have used (e.g. surname or your CSRid). If you have paid your first subscription, please also complete the information in the Subscription form and attach it to your e-mail.
Fellows pay an annual subscription (currently £20), and you may wish to consider setting up a standing order to ensure timely payment. Reminders will be sent annually and membership will lapse if subscriptions are not paid in a timely way. A Fellow may apply for readmission on payment of all subscription arrears. A Fellow, or Fellow-elect, may compound for all annual subscriptions with a single payment of £150. A Fellow of ten years' standing may compound for all future annual subscriptions with a single payment of £100.
A Fellow may choose to receive either Mathematical Proceedings or Biological Reviews, currently £30 for Mathematical Proceedings and £15 per annum for Biological Reviews (in addition to the annual membership subscription). If a Fellow is a registered Postgraduate Student, resident in Cambridge on 1 January of any year, there is no additional charge, for that year, for whichever of our journals is deemed relevant by their Supervisor. Please contact philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk if you would like to request a journal subscription.
A Fellow who has reached the aged of 67 and has been a Fellow for 25 years may request the Council to remit future subscriptions. Any Fellow wishing to take advantage of this bye-law should contact the Executive Secretary.
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From Darwin’s paper on evolution to the development of stem cell research, publications from the Society continue to shape the scientific landscape.
Mathematical Proceedings is one of the few high-quality journals publishing original research papers that cover the whole range of pure and applied mathematics, theoretical physics and statistics.
Biological Reviews covers the entire range of the biological sciences, presenting several review articles per issue. Although scholarly and with extensive bibliographies, the articles are aimed at non-specialist biologists as well as researchers in the field.
The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
Become a Fellow of the Society and enjoy the benefits that membership brings. Membership costs £20 per year.
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One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows. The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics. Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described. As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields.
Today, the world is captivated by cognitive AI applications such as large language models. But what will it take to bring the benefits of AI into the messy, diverse and safety-critical physical world? Robotics and autonomous systems must deal with open-ended environments, irreversible physical actions, and deployment economics that look very different from pure software.
In this talk, I will outline the frontier challenges and opportunities in embodying AI in the real world, drawing on our journey building Wayve. Originating from research on deep learning for scene understanding at the University of Cambridge, Wayve has spent the last decade developing Embodied Intelligence for autonomous driving. Our technology has been demonstrated across more than 500 cities in Europe, North America and Asia, and will soon be deployed with major automakers such as Nissan and fleet partners like Uber.
I will share the key technical ideas, system-level lessons, and open problems that must be solved to make Embodied AI a safe, scalable and economically viable reality.
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