Cambridge: a rich heritage of scientists

Old rival Oxford comes second in the Times Higher Education Supplement league table, beating leading universities in the United States.

The paper also reported that Cambridge has been awarded nearly �1m to set up an endowment fund to honour renowned scientist Professor Stephen Hawking.

US universities dominated the other top places for sciences.

Harvard, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came in third, fourth and fifth positions respectively.

The rankings were gathered from an expert panel of 1,300 academics around the world.

Top 10 universities for science 1 Cambridge (UK) 2 Oxford (UK) 3 Harvard (US) 4 California, Berkeley (US) 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) 6 Stanford (US) 7 Tokyo (Japan) 8 Princeton (US) 9 California Institute of Technology (US) 10 Imperial College London (UK)

David Secher, director of research services at Cambridge, told the paper: "It is pleasing but perhaps not surprising that the home of Newton, Darwin, Crick and Watson and now Stephen Hawking is perceived as the world leader in science.

"We are clear that there is a leading group of universities in the US and the UK against which we benchmark ourselves.

"It is also clear that there are no European universities outside the UK in this group and we want as a nation to be sure not to sacrifice this position."

Meanwhile an anonymous US donor has given �960,000 to set up an endowment fund to honour Prof Hawking.

A spokeswoman for Cambridge University said Professor Hawking planned to spend the money on "providing positions for young cosmologists and financial support for their research".

Professor Hawking said: "The ultimate aim of cosmology is to understand the origin of the universe.

"How does fundamental theory produce the marvellous and complex structure we observe today from a simple beginning?