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Henry Lucas

The Reverend Henry Lucas (c.1610-December 1663) was Member of Parliament for Cambridge University from 1639 to 1640.

In his will he founded the Henry Lucas Charity with a bequest of £7000, to be spent on building an almshouse for poor old men and on employing a chaplain as its Master.

He also bequeathed his collection of 4000 books (including Galileo's Dialogo of 1632) to the University Library, along with enough land to give an income of £100 a year, which was to be used to fund a professorship of "mathematick" (now the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics).