The contest for the Lucasian professorship in 1760 symbolized the state of English mathematics at the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century, in more ways than one. Unlike Saunderson and Colson, Maseres and Waring were products of Cambridge University. Their mathematics was shaped, albeit with different results, by the Cambridge mathematical traditions in place by the midcentury. Like many Cambridge mathematical scholars of their period, both men were influenced by Saunderson's Elements of Algebra, which “was long the standard treatise on the subject.” In his major mathematical work, A Dissertation on the Use of the Negative Sign in Algebra of 1758, Maseres praised certain aspects of Saunderson's Elements even as he severely criticized the book's liberal use of negative quantities. In 1760 Waring reported that everyone at Cambridge was reading Saunderson and cited the latter as the “Authority” for some of his own mathematical manipulations.

Maseres and Waring were not ordinary Cambridge graduates. They were high wranglers, fourth and senior (or first) wranglers, respectively. That is, the election of 1760 was the first Lucasian election to be contested by Cambridge graduates who had distinguished themselves in the mathematical honors course that solidified at the university around the mid-eighteenth century. This course was a natural outgrowth of the university's emphasis on mathematics as a logic. If mathematics was really the best instrument to exercise and train the human mind, and Cambridge was charged by the Elizabethan statutes to teach logic to all second- and third-year undergraduates, the argument ran, then the undergraduate curriculum should center on mathematics.