SLPAD 20 - some due diligence

[Michael Bailey]

Clerk Maxwell - a purveyor of entropy meme, speculative demonologist also
mentioned & glossed in CoL49.
Big cognitive leap regarding electromagnetic unification. Predicted the
existence of radio waves.
He was a first cousin of the civil engineer William Dyce Cay (but probably
not of the comedian Andrew Dice Clay)
Curious at an early age,
“By the age of three, everything that moved, shone, or made a noise drew
the question: ‘what's the go o' that?’”

“Having arrived on his first day of school wearing a pair of homemade shoes
and a tunic, he earned the unkind nickname of  “Daftie.” He never seemed to
resent the nickname, bearing it without complaint for many years.”

Did some interesting things with jelly. It’s all in Wikipedia.




PG Tait - another Scottish physicist - 2nd banana to Hamilton on the
advocacy of quaternions.
“In 1871, he emphasised the significance and future importance of the
“principle of dissipation of energy” (second law of thermodynamics.)

A year well-spent!

“In 1880, he worked on the four-color theorem and proved that it was true
if and only if no snarks were planar.”

Superb time management system, he must’ve had.
Worked with Lord Kelvin also, and found time for the theory of knots.



Clausius - German physics/mathematics polymath with legendary muttonchop
sideburns, at least in the Wikipedia picture, and an expression that
manages to look stern, surprised, and yet not devoid of humor.

Later American physicist and humorist Leon Cooper said of Clausius’s
invention of the word “entropy” that “he succeeded in coining a word that
meant the same thing to everybody: nothing.”


Willard Gibbs - also prominent in AtD
Subject of a biography and a long poem by Muriel Rukeyser.
>From a very Brahmanical New England family.
His father, Josiah Gibbs, was the abolitionist who found an interpreter for
the Amistad enslaved people so they could testify in court.
Received the first PhD in Engineering given in America & only the 5th
doctorate in any subject in the United States.

Had a mailing list:

“In his autobiography, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Gian-Carlo_Rota> tells
of casually browsing the mathematical stacks of Sterling Library
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Sterling_Library> and
stumbling on a handwritten mailing list, attached to some of Gibbs's course
notes, which listed over two hundred notable scientists of his day,
including Poincaré, Boltzmann, David Hilbert
<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/David_Hilbert>,
and Ernst
Mach <https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Ernst_Mach>.”