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Maxwell's Newtonian Inheritance
Harmon: Maxwell inevitably located himself within the problem area of his own day. He wasn't directly necessarily concerned with the classic Newtonian problems, or certainly not in the way in which Newton had been. The third of the papers he wrote when he was still an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, a really quite remarkable piece on a subject called elastic solids. It involves a sort of vast familiarity with a lot of difficult current mathematics,. developed both in France and indeed in this country in Cambridge. And all of this then, even before he'd gone as an undergraduate onto Cambridge, the mathematical tripos there gave him the basic structural grounding that he was going to need.