James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and was educated at his country home until he was 78 years old, when his mother died.
He attended the University of Edinburgh at the age 16, and at age 19, he went Peterhouse Cambridge but moved trinity to obtain a fellowship.
In 1856, he moved to Marischal College in Aberdeen to be near his father. In 1860, Maxwell was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy at King’s College in London, where he did his most productive work and from 1871 until his death.
The eponymous equations were actually developed by several physicists but it was Maxwell who determined the importance of these four equations from the many in the field of theoretical physics that completely define the entire filed of electromagnetics.
The equations first appeared in the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. He wrote this book was essentially to explain Faraday’s idea into a mathematical and therefore more universal form.
The publication of the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism was the turning point in electromagnetics. It was for the first time since Oersted’s discovery of the link between electricity and magnetism that this link extended to the generation and propagation waves.
Maxwell’s four equations govern all the characteristics of magnetic and electric field. Individually there are titled:
*Ampere’s law
*Faraday’s law of induction
*Gauss; electric law
*Gauss’ magnetic
These equations are assumed to be one of the greatest achievements of the 19th century mathematics.
James Clerk Maxwell and Maxwell’s equations
