Electricity and Magnetism

Course Project: Electricity & Magnetism

1.- Maxwell´s Equations

Biographies

a. Michael Faraday : born on 22 September 1791 in south London and died on 25 August 1867 at Hampton Court

Faraday interests in chemistry started when he assisted to the lectures of Humphry Davy at the Royal Institute in which after a constant effort in 1813 he became his assistant. In 1821, he published his work on electromagnetic rotation (the principle behind the electric motor). After several attempts in 1831, Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind the electric transformer and generator. This discovery was crucial in allowing electricity to be transformed from a curiosity into a powerful new technology. He was kind of responsible for the introduction of words such as 'electrode', 'cathode' and 'ion'. In 1840’s he’s health started to deteriorate and his contributions to science decrease significantly although he could gave his name to the 'farad', originally describing a unit of electrical charge but later a unit of electrical capacitance. He is considered as a British chemist and physicist who contributed significantly to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

b. James C. Maxwell: born on 13 June 1831 in Edinburgh, Scotland and died on 5 Nov 1879 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England.

He was a very special man, since he was 3 years old his natural curiosity display itself by doing things such as investigating the hidden course of streams and bell-wires, the way the water gets from the pond through the wall just to set some examples. At the age of 14, Maxwell wrote a paper on ovals. In this work he generalized the definition of an ellipse by defining the locus of a point where the sum of m times the distance from one fixed point plus n times the distance from a second fixed point is constant. If m = n = 1 then the curve is an ellipse. Maxwell also defined curves where there were more than two foci (A fixed point...