Volume 1
The life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs / by Silvanus P. Thompson.
- Silvanus P. Thompson
- Date:
- 1910
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs / by Silvanus P. Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![career. Lord Kelvin himself gave me the following account of the matter :— ‘The origin of my devotion to these problems is that after I had attended in 1839 Nichol’s Senior Natural Philosophy Class, I had become filled with the utmost admiration for the splendour and poetry of Fourier. Nichol was not a mathematician, and did not profess to have really read Fourier, but he was capable of perceiving his greatness and of understanding what he was driving at, and of making us appreciate it. I asked Nichol if he thought I could read Fourier. He replied ‘ perhaps.’ He thought the book a work of most transcendent merit. So on the 1st of May [1840], the very day when the prizes were given, I took Fourier out of the University Library; and in a fortnight I had mastered it—gone right through it.” Fourier’s 7héorze analytigue de la chaleur had appeared in Paris in 1822. In this work he set himself to establish on a thorough basis of mathe- matical analysis the theory of the movement of heat in bodies and between bodies. It is characterised by the same extreme elegance of exposition which distinguishes the writings of Laplace, Lagrange, and Poisson in their treatment of other branches of mathematical physics; while its spacious verbiage and refinement of style is such as to cause Clerk Maxwell to pronounce it a great mathematical poem. At the date of its appearance the applica- tion of the methods of analysis to Mechanics and Astronomy was a comparative novelty; and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b31360403_0001_0042.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
