William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was an Irish-Scottish mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast in 1824. Temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour.
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| William Thomson, aged 22 |
He was educated in Glasgow, where his father was a mathematics professor, and Cambridge university.
He was the professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, where he undertook significant research and mathematical analysis of electricity, was instrumental in the formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and contributed significantly to unifying physics, which was then in its infancy of development as an emerging academic discipline. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883 and served as its president from 1890 to 1895. In 1892, he became the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords.
He died in 1907 at home in Glasgow and was buried in Westminster Abbey
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