Senior Wrangler

The Senior Wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge in England, a position which has been described as "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain".

[1] Specifically, it is the person who achieves the highest overall mark among the Wranglers – the students at Cambridge who gain first-class degrees in mathematics.

They include George Airy, Jacob Bronowski, Christopher Budd, Kevin Buzzard, Arthur Cayley, Donald Coxeter, Arthur Eddington, Ben Green, John Herschel, James Inman, J. E. Littlewood, Lee Hsien Loong, Jayant Narlikar, Morris Pell, John Polkinghorne, Frank Ramsey, Lord Rayleigh (John Strutt), Sir George Stokes, Isaac Todhunter, Sir Gilbert Walker, and James H. Wilkinson.

The examiner no longer announces the students' exact rankings, but they still identify the Senior Wrangler, nowadays tipping their academic hat when reading out the person's name.

Those who have finished between third and 12th include Archibald Hill, Karl Pearson and William Henry Bragg (third), George Green, G. H. Hardy, and Alfred North Whitehead (fourth), Adam Sedgwick (fifth), John Venn (sixth), Bertrand Russell, Nevil Maskelyne and Sir James Timmins Chance (seventh), Thomas Malthus (ninth), and John Maynard Keynes and William Henry Fox Talbot (12th).

In recent years, the custom of discretion regarding ranking has progressively vanished, and all Senior Wranglers since 2010 have announced their identity publicly.

As he had contributed to reforming the Tripos with the aim that an excellent performance would be less dependent on solving hard problems and more so on showing a broad mathematical understanding and knowledge, G.H.

Pólya did so, and to Hardy's surprise, received the highest mark, an achievement which, had he been a student, would have made him the Senior Wrangler.

In his Discworld series of novels, Terry Pratchett has a character called the Senior Wrangler, a faculty member at the Unseen University, whose first name is Horace.