P.M. Harman,
The scientific letters and papers of James Clerk Maxwell. Volume 1. 1846-1862
. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xxvii + 748, £125.00. ISBN 0-521-25625-9 James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was arguably the most important British physicist in the latter half of the last century; a period in which there was some stiff competition from, for example, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and G.G. Stokes. With Darwin and Faraday he is among the men of science of the 19th century most widely admired by modern scientists. The reasons for this are not hard to find. His work had a lasting impact on physics and he pursued the subject both experimentally and mathematically in ways very similar to the methods of modern science: especially in the mathematical representation of physical quantities. Maxwell has been the subject of much scholarly study in recent years, but no scholarly biography of him has appeared or, so far as I am aware, is in progress. Furthermore, his immediate followers, the Maxwellians, have also been studied extensively. The lack of biography and concentration on followers might be taken to be a little curious except for the fact that a surprisingly small quantity of manuscript material has survived, for someone of his eminence. One of the reasons for this is obvious. His house, Glenlair, was destroyed by fire and it seems likely that much of his archive was consumed in the flames. However, the manuscript writings of any individual fall into two groups, those that are kept by the writer and those that are sent as letters to friends and colleagues. Here the fate of Maxwell’s manuscripts becomes more problematic. Of course those letters he wrote to his father and wife would most likely have been destroyed in the fire. But many of his letters to, for example, Stokes and Thomson, which should be in their archives, have simply disappeared, leaving no trace. Furthermore, much of his incoming correspondence has not survived, presumably because it too was destroyed in the fire.
Dynamical structure of highly eccentric discs with applications to tidal disruption events