James H. Jeans

James H. Jeans was born on September 11, 1877 to William Tullock Jeans, a parliamentary journalist and scientific biographer. Jeans displayed an early affection to physics and mechanics, mainly through clocks, which he manipulated and thoroughly understood with experience. He attended the Merchant Taylor's School from 1890 to 1896, and entered the Trinity College of Cambridge that same year. In 1901, he was elected a fellow of the school, and in 1903 obtained his M.A. His first treatise, published that same year, was his Dynamical Theory of Gases.

From 1905 to 1909, Jeans was a professor of applied mathematics at Princeton, where he wrote two textbooks- Theoretical Mechanics and Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism, the far more successful of the two. In 1907, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and married his first wife, Charlotte Tiffany Mitchell, with which he had one daughter. Jeans was a lecturer in applied mathematics at Cambridge from 1910 to 1912, when he officially retired from university duties and focused solely on writing and research.

Jeans' Report on Radiation and the Quantum Theory appeared in 1914 and was one of the first widely publicized and accepted papers on the quantum theory. From then, his interests turned to Astronomy, evidenced by his Adams Prize essay, Problems of Cosmology and Stellar Dynamics, published in 1919, and his book Astronomy and Cosmogony, published in 1928. He was elected as the secretary of the Royal Society from 1919 to 1929, vice-president from 1938 1940, president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1938 to 1940 and president of the British Association for Advancement of Science in 1934. In 1932, he was made a research assistant of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, and he held the chair of the Royal Institution's astronomy wing from its establishment in 1935 until his death.

In 1928 he retired from scientific research, 6 years before his first wife's death in 1934. In 1935 he met and married Suzanne Hock, a concert organist. Following in her footsteps, he spent the rest of his days focusing on music, even publishing scientific material on the matter in the form of his book on acoustics, Science and Music. Published in 1938, he went on to conduct the Royal Academy of Music. He died in 1946 from coronary thrombosis.