John Walker reviews a biography” target=”_blank”>biography of this underappreciated scientist.
4 thoughts on “James Clerk Maxwell”
I’ve read “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics” by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon. It’s a well written tale connecting the lives of these two pioneers who, unfortunately, never met.
Will definitely put this one on my list. One nit in the review: it mentions the “modern vector form” of Maxwell’s equations, but it would have been nice to give a shout-out to the electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who reduced the original twenty equations to the four vector equations we all know and love today (and made them a hell of a lot more comprehensible and useful in the process). Heaviside was almost as important to the whole story as Faraday, sort of the equivalent role that Freeman Dyson played to Richard Feynman in the development of QED.
(Heaviside also developed what is now called the Laplace transform for solving differential equations, but the mathematicians couldn’t bring themselves to name something for a mere engineer, so they dredged up some slightly relevant work by Laplace and incorporated the Heaviside transform into mathematics under Laplace’s name. Heaviside was also second only to Gibbs in his contributions to vector calculus.)
Thanks, cthulhu! That’s the neatest thing I learned all week. I’ll go dig up some info on Heaviside. Any books about him that you recommend?
I’ve thought the Maxwell story was a bit sad. He died rather young.
I’ve read “Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics” by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon. It’s a well written tale connecting the lives of these two pioneers who, unfortunately, never met.
Will definitely put this one on my list. One nit in the review: it mentions the “modern vector form” of Maxwell’s equations, but it would have been nice to give a shout-out to the electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside, who reduced the original twenty equations to the four vector equations we all know and love today (and made them a hell of a lot more comprehensible and useful in the process). Heaviside was almost as important to the whole story as Faraday, sort of the equivalent role that Freeman Dyson played to Richard Feynman in the development of QED.
(Heaviside also developed what is now called the Laplace transform for solving differential equations, but the mathematicians couldn’t bring themselves to name something for a mere engineer, so they dredged up some slightly relevant work by Laplace and incorporated the Heaviside transform into mathematics under Laplace’s name. Heaviside was also second only to Gibbs in his contributions to vector calculus.)
Thanks, cthulhu! That’s the neatest thing I learned all week. I’ll go dig up some info on Heaviside. Any books about him that you recommend?
I’ve thought the Maxwell story was a bit sad. He died rather young.