James Clerk Maxwell 

Jose Antonio Alvarez Rivera

      James Clerk Maxwell was a scottish mathematician and physicist who published physical and mathematical theories of the electromagnetic field. He was born in 13 June 1831 and died in 5 November 1879. His best achievement was the development of the classical electromagnetic theory synthesizing all previous unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity and magnetism. His mother help him since he was a little boy and took responsibility of his education. He was really fascinated by geometry and most of his great talent went unnoticed. For his first scientific work he wrote a paper describing a mechanical means of drawing mathematical curves with a piece of twine and the properties of elloipses and curves with more than two foci. He presented his work with the help of his professor James forbes of natural philosophy at the royal society of Edinburgh. When he was eighteenth years old he contributed two papers for the transactions of the royal society of Edinburgh. One was the Equilibrium of Elastic Solids and the other was of the rolling curves.  

Maxwell graduated from trinity in 1854 with a degree in mathematics. He manage to score second highest in the final examination behind Edward Routh and then he earn himself the title of second wrangler.  

The nature and perception of colour was one of his greatest interests and he began at Edinburgh University while he was a student of Forbes. He took the coloured spinning tops invented by Forbes and was able to demostrade that white light would result from a mixture of red, green and blue light. His paper of experiment on colour laid out the principles of colour combination and he presented it at the royal society of Edinburgh in March 1855. Immediately he was made a fellow of trinity on 10 October of 1855 and was asked to prepare lectures on hydrostatics and optics and to set examination papers. Then he was awarded the Royal Society’s Rumford medal in 1860 for his work on colour and elected to the society itself in 1861. He resigned the chair at king’s college London and returned to Glendair  in  1865. Then he wrote a textbook of the theory of heat in 1871 and an elementary treatise on matter and motion in 1876. And also he was the first to make explicit use of dimensional analysis in 1871.  

Maxwell became the first Cavendish professor of physics at Cambridge in 1871 and was put in charge of the development of the Cavendish laboratory. Maxwell is considered one of the greatest scientific in our time, too bad he died young. He’s work in electromagtetism has been called “the second great unification in physics” after the first one carried out by Isaac Newton. He demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in the form of waves and at the constant speed of light. Einstein describe he’s work as “the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. Einstein kept a photograph of him on his study wall with pictures of Michael Faraday and Newton. He died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48.