Larmor

Sir Joseph Larmor

Born: 11 July 1857 in Magheragall, County Antrim, Ireland
Died: 19 May 1942 in Holywood, County Down, Ireland

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Joseph Larmor was educated at Belfast and Cambridge and taught at Galway, Ireland from 1880 to 1885. He then went to Cambridge becoming Lucasian Professor there in 1903.

He worked on electricity, dynamics and thermodynamics. Larmor wrote Aether and Matter in 1900 (renamed by Lamb Aether and no matter ). He gave an explanation of the FitzGerald contraction independently of Lorentz. He was the first to calculate the rate of energy radiation from an accelerating electron and the first to explain the splitting of the spectral lines in a magnetic field.

Knighted in 1909, Larmor served as MP for the University of Cambridge from 1911 to 1922. The Royal Society awarded him its Royal Medal in 1915 and its Copley Medal in 1921. He was also awarded the De Morgan Medal of the London Mathematical Society in 1914.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about Larmor's work on special relativity

Other Web sites:

MIT, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. A S Eddington, Joseph Larmor, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 4 (1942-43), 197-207. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996