Maxwell was only fourteen when a paper he’d written was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He went on to study at Cambridge, overcoming a reputation as a bit of a nerd, to earn the respect of his peers.

Although Maxwell’s interests ran from poetry to the question of why a cat will always land on its feet, it was his work in mathematics and physics that paved the way for scientists and discoveries of the future.

Maxwell is credited with paving the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity; for laying the foundation for the quantum theory; for theories of light and electro-magnetics that led to the discovery of radio waves, the telegraph, and ultimately all of the electronics that we use today; and his suggestion that the rings around Saturn were composed of solids was confirmed a century later by the Voyager space probe.

Maxwell was married to Katherine Mary Dewar in June 1859. He died in Cambridge in November of 1879, at the age of 48. Einstein would later suggest that Maxwell’s work represented the most significant revolution in the study of physics since Newton.