The Pavers of Maxwell´s Pathway to His Equations [Historical Corner]

In this contribution, we will analyze and briefly present the scientists cited by Maxwell in his 1864 dissertation, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” [1]. The analysis will distinguish between researchers that are merely mentioned by Maxwell and those for which a precise citation to published papers is given. For the sake of clarity, since in [1] citations were often given in a very short form without titles or pages, the full bibliographical references are given here [2-26]. Furthermore, for these papers we will also inves tigate the “second-level citations,” that is, researchers cited by those cited by Maxwell. A third-level investigation was done only for [27], which is a self-citation by Maxwell in [2].