MYSTERIES OF THE EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE - HIKARI Ltd

168 Biographical Vignettes
ellipse by defining the locus of a point where the sum of m times the distance
from one fixed point plus n times the distance from a second fixed point is
constant. (m = n = 1 corresponds to an ellipse.) He also defined curves where
there were more than two foci. This first paper, On the description of oval
curves, and those having a plurality of foci, was read to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh in 1846. At age 16, he entered the University of Edinburgh and,
although he could have attended Cambridge after his first term, he instead
completed the full course of undergraduate studies at Edinburgh. At age 18,
he contributed two papers to the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
In 1850, he moved to Cambridge University, first to Peterhouse and
then to Trinity where he felt his chances for a fellowship were greater. He
was elected to the secret Society of Apostles, was Second Wrangler and tied
for Smith’s Prizeman. He obtained his fellowship and graduated with a degree
in Mathematics in 1854. Immediately after taking his degree, he read
to the Cambridge Philosophical Society the purely mathematical memoir On
the transformation of surfaces by bending. In 1855, he presented Experiments
on colour to the Royal Society of Edinburgh where he laid out the principles
of colour combination based upon his observations of colored spinning tops
(Maxwell discs). (Application 14 concerns the related Maxwell Color Triangle.)
In 1855 and 1856, he read his two part paper On Faraday’s lines of force
to the Cambridge Philosophical Society where he showed that a few simple
mathematical equations could express the behavior of electric and magnetic
fields and their interaction. In 1856, Maxwell took up an appointment at Marishcal
College in Aberdeen. He spent the next two years working on the nature
of Saturn’s rings and, in 1859, he was awarded the Adams Prize of St. John’s
College, Cambridge for his paper On the stability of Saturn’s rings where he
showed that stability could only be achieved if the rings consisted of numerous
small solid particles, an explanation finally confirmed by the Voyager spacecrafts
in the 1980’s! In 1860, he was appointed to the vacant chair of Natural
Philosophy at King’s College in London. He performed his most important experimental
work during the six years that he spent there. He was awarded the
Royal Society’s Rumford medal in 1860 for his work on color which included
the world’s first color photograph, and was elected to the Society in 1861. He
also developed his ideas on the viscosity of gases (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic
theory of gases), and proposed the basics of dimensional analysis. This time
is especially known for the advances he made in electromagnetism: electromagnetic
induction, displacement current and the identification of light as an
electromagnetic phenomenon. In 1865, he left King’s College and returned to
his Scottish estate of Glenlair until 1871 when he became the first Cavendish
Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He designed the Cavendish laboratory
and helped set it up. The four partial differential equations now known as
Maxwell’s equations first appeared in fully developed form in A Treatise on