Birthday of James Clerk Maxwell (1831)

Maxwell's four equations — published in 1865 — describe all electric and magnetic phenomena in breathtaking mathematical elegance. From these four equations, Maxwell derived that electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light — and concluded that light itself is an electromagnetic wave. This was a purely mathematical prediction, confirmed by Hertz experimentally only after Maxwell's death. Einstein kept a portrait of Maxwell alongside Newton and Faraday on his study wall and called Maxwell's work 'the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since Newton.'