James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh and grew up on his family's estate at Glenlair in southwestern Scotland. His mother died when he was eight. At school his country clothes and accent earned him the nickname Dafty, but at fourteen he published a paper on drawing oval curves. He studied at Edinburgh and Cambridge and held professorships at Aberdeen, King's College London and Cambridge. He showed that Saturn's rings must be made of many small particles, and he made the first color photograph, of a tartan ribbon, in 1861. His greatest work joined electricity, magnetism and light. Building on Faraday's lines of force, he wrote a set of equations, now called Maxwell's equations, describing how electric and magnetic fields behave, and found that they predicted waves traveling at the speed of light; he concluded that light itself is an electromagnetic wave. This led later to radio. He also helped found the theory of gases. A devout Christian, he was the first director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. He died of cancer in 1879, at forty-eight.

Faith: An evangelical Presbyterian who had a conversion experience in 1853 and later became an elder of the Church of Scotland. Source: Wikipedia