Charles Percy Snow had at various points in his life been a physicist, a civil servant, a writer and a public figure. He famously delivered the Rede lecture in 1959 entitled
The Two Cultures, a controversial attack on the divisions between the worlds of arts and science in Western society.
His background put him in a more or less unique position to make this claim: having spent his early years as a research scientist at
Cambridge (he was a fellow of
Christ's College), in probably its greatest age of scientific brilliance (he was contemporary with
Rutherford,
Dirac and
Bragg), he continued his career after the war as a respected novellist and playright.
Snow was also one of
G.H. Hardy's great friends, and his foreword to
A Mathematician's Apology reveals a lot more about the man than he did in his own words.
He was awarded a life peerage in 1964, and died in 1980.