James Clerk Maxwell Facts
James Clerk Maxwell Facts
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| Interesting James Clerk Maxwell Facts: |
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| James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and was the only child of an aristocratic family. |
| In his early years he was homeschooled in the classics by his mother and in November 1841 at the age of 10 he entered Edinburgh Academy. |
| When he was 13 he won the Mathematics Medal and the first prize in both English and poetry. |
| At 14 he wrote a scientific paper on using a piece of twine to draw mathematical curves and the properties of ellipses, Cartesian ovals and related curves of more than two foci. |
| He wrote two foundational papers, Oval Curves and Rolling Curves for the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh but was considered too young to present them himself. |
| In 1847 he entered the University of Edinburgh and his experiments with polarized light led to his discovery of photoelasticity as a means of determining the stress distribution in physical objects. |
| In October 1850 he entered Cambridge University and received his degree in mathematics in 1854. |
| In 1855 he presented his paper, Experiments on Colour to the Royal Society in which he proved that white light is a mixture and described the principles of color combination. |
| On October 10, 1855 he was made a fellow Trinity College and was asked to lecture on hydrostatics and optics. |
| In February 1856 he applied for and received the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen. |
| In 1857 he received the Adams Prize for his paper "On the stability of the motion of Saturn's rings" which proved they were neither liquid nor solid but were composed of small particles in orbit. |
| In the 1980 the Voyager confirmed Maxwell's hypothesis with a direct fly-by. |
| In 1860 he accepted the Chair of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London though a serious case of smallpox delayed his arrival by a few months. |
| In 1860 he was awarded the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society for his work on color and in 1861 was elected to the Society. |
| In 1861 he published On physical lines of force which described electromagnetic induction and magnetic flux. |
| In 1871 he became the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge and supervised the development of the Cavendish Laboratory. |
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