MacTutor
P G Tait
Times obituary
We regret to announce the death of Professor Tait, who up to February last occupied the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. For some time past he had been in failing health; he had been much shaken by the death of his son Frederick, the famous Scottish amateur golfer, who was killed in South Africa shortly after Magersfontein. Professor Tait's death occurred yesterday morning at the house of his friend and pupil, Sir John Murray, in Edinburgh.
Peter Guthrie Tait, whose father was private secretary to the late Duke of Buccleuch, was born at Dalkeith on April 28, 1831. He went to school at Edinburgh Academy and after spending a year at the University, where he studied under Forbes and Kelland (the latter of whom afterwards referred to him as first his pupil, then his colleague, and lastly his teacher), he went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and graduated as Senior Wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 1852. In the same year he was elected a Fellow of his college and in 1854 was appointed Professor of Mathematics in Queen's College, Belfast. Six years later he returned to Edinburgh to succeed his master, Forbes, in the professorship of natural philosophy - a position which he held practically until the end of his life.
Professor Tait's scientific work covers a wide range of mathematics and physics. His collected papers are now being published by the Cambridge University Press, and two large volumes of 500 pages each have already appeared, while a third will still be required to complete the work, which after all is only a selection. In his preface to the first volume, Professor Tait himself says that, although in doubtful cases he had been asked to lean rather to the side of comprehension than of exclusion, the selection had given him great anxiety, for "even after the numerous polemical items had, of course, been set aside, the doubtful cases formed a large majority." The earliest entry in which his name is to be found is in the Royal Society's catalogue of scientific papers, a note on the density of ozone, published in 1856, and which formed one of the results of research carried out conjointly with his then colleague, Dr. Andrews of Belfast, the author of famous investigations into the continuity of gaseous and liquid states. From 1880 papers began to appear under his own name only. For the first few years those are mainly mathematical and concerned largely with quaternions. For Hamilton, who is usually admitted to be the inventor of quaternions, he had a profound admiration; while a quite young man he made his acquaintance through the introduction of Dr. Andrews, and he may fairly be regarded as his successor in carrying on and completing that new mathematical calculus. His presidential address to the mathematical section of the British Association in 1871 was in part devoted to its consideration, and his elementary textbook on the subject is probably the best in existence. The other part of that address was taken up with dissensing the principle of the dissipation of energy, which he declared at the time to be one of the most promising parts of the field open to the physicist, and which, along with many neighbouring plots, he himself, at least, cultivated diligently and successfully. In 1864 he published a short paper in the Philosophical Magazine on the history of thermodynamics, and from that time onwards his contributions on that and kindred topics became frequent. Thermoelectricity was the topic of the Rede lecture which he delivered at Cambridge in 1873, and in the same year he presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he became secretary in 1879, a first approximation to his well-known thermoelectric diagram. Between 1886 and 1892 an elaborate series of papers on the foundations of the kinetic theory of gases was read before the same society, and about the same time he carried out an inquiry which, under the title of "Impact," veiled an investigation into certain phenomena connected with golf, of which he was a keen devotee, especially into the fact that a ball can be jerked nearly as far as it can be driven. Another important inquiry of an earlier date had to do with the determination of the corrections to be applied to the readings of the thermometers used in the Challenger expedition for deep-sea observations, insofar as they were affected by the pressures to which the instruments were subjected, and from this investigation sprang another on some of the physical properties of fresh water and sea water, in particular their behaviour with regard to compressibility and the development of heat under enormous pressures. He also made contributions to optical questions, such as the theory of mirages and haloes, and to spectrum analysis.
Besides his scientific papers, he was the author of many books. Perhaps the one that deserves first mention is the classic "Treatise on Natural Philosophy," written in conjunction with Lord Kelvin, the first edition of which appeared in 1867. Among other textbooks from his pen may be mentioned "Dynamics of a Particle" (with Steele), published in 1856, "Light" (second edition, 1889), "Heat" (second edition, 1891), and "Properties of Matter (second edition, 1890). His "Lectures on some Recent Advances in Physical Science (third edition, 1885) are a model of lucid popular exposition of abstruse scientific conceptions, and the prefaces to the various editions of the work give a good idea of how hard and how straight he could hit when he met an adversary who really called forth his polemical strength. "The Unseen Universe," written with Balfour Stewart, of which "Paradoxical Philosophy" was a sequel, ran through many editions. Among his writings, too, the articles he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica (e.g., Radiation, Thermodynamics, and Quaternions) deserve notice, as do his biographical notices; some, like the admirable one by Clerk Maxwell, contributed to the Encyclopædia; others, like that of Andrews, published in collected editions of their subject's works.
Professor Tait was a man of strong individuality, a good friend, and a good host. The Fellowship of the Royal Society, an honour which most men of science esteem it a privilege to possess, he rejected of his own choice, though that did not prevent the society from bestowing a Royal medal on him in 1886. His familiar figure was marked by a certain eccentricity, or carelessness, of dress, and some of his intimate friends can scarcely remember ever having seen him in a dress suit. Dining out was indeed an abomination in his eyes, unless it were informally in the company of one or two kindred spirits. As a teacher he was first rate, and he excelled in what has proved a rock of offence before now to many an able Scottish professor, the management of a large class. His style of lecturing was lucid and studiously simple, his experiments chosen with a single aim: the explanation of the matter in hand. For mere sensational display by the teacher he had as much contempt as for the "pernicious practice" of unlimited note-taking by the student. The university classroom, he said, was not a place of public amusement, with its "pantomimic displays of red and blue fire, its tricks whether of prestigiation or of prestidigitation, and its stump-oratory"; oratory, he declared, was essentially art, and, therefore, could not be science. Yet, while he taught that science is essentially simple and is best expressed in the simplest and most direct forms possible, he also warned his pupils that its study is beset with difficulties and held, as Aristotle did of moral philosophy, that a certain maturity of mind is necessary to overcome them successfully. But, whatever may have been his theory, the efficacy of his practice is sufficiently attested by the number of distinguished men of science who are now proud to remember that they once sat at his feet.
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CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 29
An interesting ceremony took place in the College of Peterhouse, Cambridge, this afternoon, when Lord Kelvin unveiled a portrait of the late Professor Peter Guthrie Tait, Honorary Fellow of the College, who was Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman in 1853. The portrait, which was subscribed for by the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, was painted by Sir George Reld, President of the Royal Scottish Academy, and it will be hung in the hall of the college alongside the portraits of Lord Kelvin and the late Dr. H. W. Cookson.
Mr. J. M. Donne presided, in the unavoidable absence of the Master of Fellows' House through illness, and the attendance included the Vice-Chancellor (Dr. Chase), the Masters of Trinity, Clare, St. John's, Sidney, Pembroke, and Trinity Hall, Professors Allbutt, Liveing, Lewis, Forsyth, Thomson, Barnes, and Middleton, Sir George and Lady Murray, Dr. Hobson, Dr. Routh, Dr. Besant, Mr. Mollison, Mr. J. W. Taylor, and Mr. Alexander Talt.
Mr. Donne said the college was proud to have the portrait of Professor Tait, who was a true man of science and one who pursued the truth for its own sake.
Lord Kelvin said he valued most highly the privilege of being allowed to ask the Master and Fellows of Fellows' House to accept for their college a portrait of Professor Tait. He felt specially grateful for this privilege as a forty-years comrade, friend, and working ally of Tait. Their friendship began about 1860, when Tait came to Scotland to succeed Forbes as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh. He remembered Tait once remarking that nothing but science was worth living for. It was sincerely said, but Tait himself proved it to be not true. Tait was a great reader. He would get Shakespeare, Dickens, and Thackeray off by heart. His memory was wonderful. What he read once he always remembered. Thus he was always ready with delightful quotations, and these brightened their hours of work. For they did heavy thematic work, stone-breaking was not in it. A propos, perhaps, of the agonies (he did not mean pains, he meant struggles) of the mathematical problems which they always had with them, This once astonished him with Goethe's noble lines, showing sorrow and raising those who knew it to a higher level of spiritual life and more splendid views all around than it was fashionable to suppose fell to the lot of those who no lived a humdrum life of happiness. He did not know them, having never read the "Sorrows of Werther."
The Master of Pembroke (Sir George Stokes) spoke of Professor Tait as an intimate friend and said all who knew him must have been impressed with his great ingenuity and the versatility of his genius. They knew him as a great mathematician, but he was one who did not consider it degrading to apply mathematics to the common things of life, such as the subject of knots and how the motion of a golf ball was affected as a consequence of the resistance of the air by the way in which it was struck.
Mr. A. P. Tait replied on behalf of the family, and Mr. Dodds then read a letter from the Master of Peterhouse, in the course of which Dr. Ward said:
We regret to announce the death of Professor Tait, who up to February last occupied the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. For some time past he had been in failing health; he had been much shaken by the death of his son Frederick, the famous Scottish amateur golfer, who was killed in South Africa shortly after Magersfontein. Professor Tait's death occurred yesterday morning at the house of his friend and pupil, Sir John Murray, in Edinburgh.
Peter Guthrie Tait, whose father was private secretary to the late Duke of Buccleuch, was born at Dalkeith on April 28, 1831. He went to school at Edinburgh Academy and after spending a year at the University, where he studied under Forbes and Kelland (the latter of whom afterwards referred to him as first his pupil, then his colleague, and lastly his teacher), he went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and graduated as Senior Wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 1852. In the same year he was elected a Fellow of his college and in 1854 was appointed Professor of Mathematics in Queen's College, Belfast. Six years later he returned to Edinburgh to succeed his master, Forbes, in the professorship of natural philosophy - a position which he held practically until the end of his life.
Professor Tait's scientific work covers a wide range of mathematics and physics. His collected papers are now being published by the Cambridge University Press, and two large volumes of 500 pages each have already appeared, while a third will still be required to complete the work, which after all is only a selection. In his preface to the first volume, Professor Tait himself says that, although in doubtful cases he had been asked to lean rather to the side of comprehension than of exclusion, the selection had given him great anxiety, for "even after the numerous polemical items had, of course, been set aside, the doubtful cases formed a large majority." The earliest entry in which his name is to be found is in the Royal Society's catalogue of scientific papers, a note on the density of ozone, published in 1856, and which formed one of the results of research carried out conjointly with his then colleague, Dr. Andrews of Belfast, the author of famous investigations into the continuity of gaseous and liquid states. From 1880 papers began to appear under his own name only. For the first few years those are mainly mathematical and concerned largely with quaternions. For Hamilton, who is usually admitted to be the inventor of quaternions, he had a profound admiration; while a quite young man he made his acquaintance through the introduction of Dr. Andrews, and he may fairly be regarded as his successor in carrying on and completing that new mathematical calculus. His presidential address to the mathematical section of the British Association in 1871 was in part devoted to its consideration, and his elementary textbook on the subject is probably the best in existence. The other part of that address was taken up with dissensing the principle of the dissipation of energy, which he declared at the time to be one of the most promising parts of the field open to the physicist, and which, along with many neighbouring plots, he himself, at least, cultivated diligently and successfully. In 1864 he published a short paper in the Philosophical Magazine on the history of thermodynamics, and from that time onwards his contributions on that and kindred topics became frequent. Thermoelectricity was the topic of the Rede lecture which he delivered at Cambridge in 1873, and in the same year he presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he became secretary in 1879, a first approximation to his well-known thermoelectric diagram. Between 1886 and 1892 an elaborate series of papers on the foundations of the kinetic theory of gases was read before the same society, and about the same time he carried out an inquiry which, under the title of "Impact," veiled an investigation into certain phenomena connected with golf, of which he was a keen devotee, especially into the fact that a ball can be jerked nearly as far as it can be driven. Another important inquiry of an earlier date had to do with the determination of the corrections to be applied to the readings of the thermometers used in the Challenger expedition for deep-sea observations, insofar as they were affected by the pressures to which the instruments were subjected, and from this investigation sprang another on some of the physical properties of fresh water and sea water, in particular their behaviour with regard to compressibility and the development of heat under enormous pressures. He also made contributions to optical questions, such as the theory of mirages and haloes, and to spectrum analysis.
Besides his scientific papers, he was the author of many books. Perhaps the one that deserves first mention is the classic "Treatise on Natural Philosophy," written in conjunction with Lord Kelvin, the first edition of which appeared in 1867. Among other textbooks from his pen may be mentioned "Dynamics of a Particle" (with Steele), published in 1856, "Light" (second edition, 1889), "Heat" (second edition, 1891), and "Properties of Matter (second edition, 1890). His "Lectures on some Recent Advances in Physical Science (third edition, 1885) are a model of lucid popular exposition of abstruse scientific conceptions, and the prefaces to the various editions of the work give a good idea of how hard and how straight he could hit when he met an adversary who really called forth his polemical strength. "The Unseen Universe," written with Balfour Stewart, of which "Paradoxical Philosophy" was a sequel, ran through many editions. Among his writings, too, the articles he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica (e.g., Radiation, Thermodynamics, and Quaternions) deserve notice, as do his biographical notices; some, like the admirable one by Clerk Maxwell, contributed to the Encyclopædia; others, like that of Andrews, published in collected editions of their subject's works.
Professor Tait was a man of strong individuality, a good friend, and a good host. The Fellowship of the Royal Society, an honour which most men of science esteem it a privilege to possess, he rejected of his own choice, though that did not prevent the society from bestowing a Royal medal on him in 1886. His familiar figure was marked by a certain eccentricity, or carelessness, of dress, and some of his intimate friends can scarcely remember ever having seen him in a dress suit. Dining out was indeed an abomination in his eyes, unless it were informally in the company of one or two kindred spirits. As a teacher he was first rate, and he excelled in what has proved a rock of offence before now to many an able Scottish professor, the management of a large class. His style of lecturing was lucid and studiously simple, his experiments chosen with a single aim: the explanation of the matter in hand. For mere sensational display by the teacher he had as much contempt as for the "pernicious practice" of unlimited note-taking by the student. The university classroom, he said, was not a place of public amusement, with its "pantomimic displays of red and blue fire, its tricks whether of prestigiation or of prestidigitation, and its stump-oratory"; oratory, he declared, was essentially art, and, therefore, could not be science. Yet, while he taught that science is essentially simple and is best expressed in the simplest and most direct forms possible, he also warned his pupils that its study is beset with difficulties and held, as Aristotle did of moral philosophy, that a certain maturity of mind is necessary to overcome them successfully. But, whatever may have been his theory, the efficacy of his practice is sufficiently attested by the number of distinguished men of science who are now proud to remember that they once sat at his feet.
_________________________________________________
CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 29
An interesting ceremony took place in the College of Peterhouse, Cambridge, this afternoon, when Lord Kelvin unveiled a portrait of the late Professor Peter Guthrie Tait, Honorary Fellow of the College, who was Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman in 1853. The portrait, which was subscribed for by the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, was painted by Sir George Reld, President of the Royal Scottish Academy, and it will be hung in the hall of the college alongside the portraits of Lord Kelvin and the late Dr. H. W. Cookson.
Mr. J. M. Donne presided, in the unavoidable absence of the Master of Fellows' House through illness, and the attendance included the Vice-Chancellor (Dr. Chase), the Masters of Trinity, Clare, St. John's, Sidney, Pembroke, and Trinity Hall, Professors Allbutt, Liveing, Lewis, Forsyth, Thomson, Barnes, and Middleton, Sir George and Lady Murray, Dr. Hobson, Dr. Routh, Dr. Besant, Mr. Mollison, Mr. J. W. Taylor, and Mr. Alexander Talt.
Mr. Donne said the college was proud to have the portrait of Professor Tait, who was a true man of science and one who pursued the truth for its own sake.
Lord Kelvin said he valued most highly the privilege of being allowed to ask the Master and Fellows of Fellows' House to accept for their college a portrait of Professor Tait. He felt specially grateful for this privilege as a forty-years comrade, friend, and working ally of Tait. Their friendship began about 1860, when Tait came to Scotland to succeed Forbes as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh. He remembered Tait once remarking that nothing but science was worth living for. It was sincerely said, but Tait himself proved it to be not true. Tait was a great reader. He would get Shakespeare, Dickens, and Thackeray off by heart. His memory was wonderful. What he read once he always remembered. Thus he was always ready with delightful quotations, and these brightened their hours of work. For they did heavy thematic work, stone-breaking was not in it. A propos, perhaps, of the agonies (he did not mean pains, he meant struggles) of the mathematical problems which they always had with them, This once astonished him with Goethe's noble lines, showing sorrow and raising those who knew it to a higher level of spiritual life and more splendid views all around than it was fashionable to suppose fell to the lot of those who no lived a humdrum life of happiness. He did not know them, having never read the "Sorrows of Werther."
Who never ate his bread in tears,But Tait gave it to him in the original German, with just one word changed:
Who never through long nights of sorrow,
Sat weeping on his bed,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers,
Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aβ,Tait hated emotionalism almost as much as he hated evil, and he did hate evil with a deadly hatred. His devotion, not only to his comrades and fellow workers—but also to older men such as Andrews and Hamilton—was a remarkable feature of his life. Tait was a most attractive personality, and its attractiveness would be readily understood when he unveiled the portrait. It gave rise to the idea of a grand man, a man whom it was a privilege to know. His only fault was that he would not come out of his shell for the last 20 years and had never become a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In unveiling the portrait, Lord Kelvin described it as a masterpiece of art.
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette rauchend saβ,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
The Master of Pembroke (Sir George Stokes) spoke of Professor Tait as an intimate friend and said all who knew him must have been impressed with his great ingenuity and the versatility of his genius. They knew him as a great mathematician, but he was one who did not consider it degrading to apply mathematics to the common things of life, such as the subject of knots and how the motion of a golf ball was affected as a consequence of the resistance of the air by the way in which it was struck.
Mr. A. P. Tait replied on behalf of the family, and Mr. Dodds then read a letter from the Master of Peterhouse, in the course of which Dr. Ward said:
Though there are not a few great names among the worthies of Peterhouse, this most ancient college is relatively poor in authentic portraits of them as they lived. We are the more rejoiced to have secured a living likeness of an individuality such as that of Professor Tait. No one who knew him, however slightly, could mistake him. He impressed himself upon all his students and upon all his friends as what he was: a true man of science, disdainful of his trappings, and intent only on the thing itself. His portrait will hang in our hall, not far from Lord Kelvin's, as we think he might have wished. May the picture and the memory of the eminent and single-minded man, which it recalls, remain enduringly associated with the endeavours and with the prosperity of Peterhouse.You can see this portrait at THIS LINK.
