Kelvin on Fourier

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One of my Friday lunch companions is reading a biography of Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), and mentioned that he had published a couple of papers on Fourier's work when he was 16.  As most of you know, I enjoy tracking down and reading historic papers. It took a bit of work to find them because the Cambridge Mathematical Journal was reprinted in a new collection that changed the volume and page numbers. 

Kelvin published them under the pseudonym "P.Q.R." According to Wikipedia, Fourier's results had been attacked by the established British math community largely because he was French; Kelvin had made the decision to study and defend "continental mathematics." *

Here are the two papers at archive.org:
  1. P.Q.R. "On Fourier's expansions of functions in trigonometric series". Cambridge Mathematical Journal. Vol 2: 258–262. (1841).  https://archive.org/details/sim_cambridge-and-dublin-mathematical-journal_1841-05_2_12/page/258/mode/2up
  2. P.Q.R. "Note on a passage in Fourier's 'Heat'". Cambridge Mathematical Journal. Vol 3: 25–27. (1841).  https://archive.org/details/sim_cambridge-and-dublin-mathematical-journal_1841-11_3_13/page/24/mode/2up

* I also have to wonder if they saw that Fourier's work was starting down the path of showing that Newton's Calculus was not on a firm theoretical foundation. Rodgers and Boman's "How We Got From There To Here: A Story of Real Analysis" has a section titled "Joseph Fourier: The Man Who Broke Calculus."  It's a free download at:
https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=oer-ost

Highly recommended reading -- be sure to have a pencil and paper handy.
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

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