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Re: True Maxwell story?



Take out the "merely". Bell (<The Development of Mathematics>, p 90)
says: "...made its first public appearance as a problem in a Cambridge
exam paper of 1854. Whetehr any of the examinees solved the problem
appears not to be known. But it seems likely that if anyone did turn
in a solution acceptable to Stokes, he could not satisfy a modern examiner
with the same solution."

Adam was by constitution and proclivity a scientist; I was the same, and
we loved to call ourselves by that great name...Our first memorable
scientific discovery was the law that water and like fluids run downhill,
not up.
Mark Twain, <Extract from Eve's Autobiography>

On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Leigh Palmer wrote:

I'm told that G. F. Stokes's famous theorem in what is now vector
calculus was merely a problem in the mathematics tripos at Cambridge.
One student sitting the tripos that year was James Clerk Maxwell.

True story?

Leigh