David Harding (financier) individuals and organisations. Harding is also the patron of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, which opened in 2009. Harding's foundation, the David and Claudia Harding Foundation, has pledged £20 million to the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, to establish The Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, a research programme to apply theoretical physics to issues of the sustainability of natural resources. The donation to the Cavendish is the largest since it was created in 1874. He is one of the managers of the Winton
Cavendish Professor of Physics would cost £6,300. The then chancellor of the university, William Cavendish met that cost privately 18 months later, and named the department in honor of his relative, the 18th century natural philosopher Henry Cavendish. The first Cavendish Professor was the then relatively obscure James Clerk Maxwell, who had yet to complete the work that would make him the most renowned physicist of the nineteenth century. His appointment was announced on 8 March 1871, and despite initial disappointment at his being offered the place, his inaugural lecture was looked forward to by his likely students as well as his future colleagues.