Educated at Edinburgh Academy, Maxwell, as early as 14 years old, wrote a paper On the Description of Oval Curves and Those Having a Plurality of Foci, which he presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1850, he moved to Cambridge where he attended and graduated from Trinity College in 1854. He received a fellowship at Trinity and in 1855 published On Faraday's Lines of Force which was presented to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In 1856, he returned to Scotland because of his father's illness and took the position of professor of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College in Aberdeen. That year he was also made a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1857, he predicted (quite correctly as it turned out) that Saturn's rings would be made up of numerous small solid objects, which won him the Adams Prize at St. Johns College, Cambridge. In 1860, he was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London. Maxwell used his time at King's well, performing a mass of experimental research in electromagnetics, the kinetic theory of gases and thermodynamics. He returned to Scotland in 1865 where he worked at his estate, Glenlair, until 1871 when he was appointed the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. In 1873, he published A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism which contained his now famous differential equations and which became one of the great mathematical achievements of the 19th century. In 1879, he published The Electrical Research of the Honourable Henry Cavendish. That same year, Maxwell's health began to deteriorate and he died in November after a very painful illness. In addition to numerous papers, Maxwell also published Theory of Heat (1870), Matter and Motion and Elementary Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1875). |
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