Joseph Larmor

Sir Joseph Larmor was an Irish mathematician, theoretical physicist and British politician, born in Magheragall in County Antrim in 1857, who made breakthroughs in the understanding of electricity, dynamics, thermodynamics and the electron theory of matter. He studied at Queen's College Belfast and St John's College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Wrangler in 1880, and from 1903 to 1932 he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He proposed that the aether was a perfectly incompressible elastic fluid and that the source of electric charge is a particle, which he was calling the electron by 1894. His most influential work was Aether and Matter, a theoretical physics book published in 1900.