Ian Hutchings has been GKN Professor of Manufacturing Engineering in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge since 2001 and was previously Reader in Tribology in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge. While his research into the contributions of Leonardo da Vinci to tribology is relatively recent, it is underpinned by more than forty years of research and technical publications on tribology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded the Tribology Trust Silver Medal in 1994. A second edition of his widely used textbook Tribology: friction and wear of engineering materials will be published in 2017.