Item 30/3 - Autograph letter signed to Donald MacAlister

Physicist. Admitted pensioner at St John's 1876; B.A. (Senior Wrangler and 1st Smith's Prize) 1880; M.A. 1883; Fellow, 1880-1942; Professor of Natural Philosophy, Queen's College, Galway, 1880-5; University Lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge, 1885-1903; Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, 1903-32; F.R.S., 1892 and Secretary of the Royal Society, 1901-12; Knighted, 1909; M.P. for the University, 1911-22; Revised J. Clerk Maxwell's edition of the papers of Henry Cavendish (1921), and edited the collected works of James Thomson (1912), the fourth and fifth volumes (1904-5) of the works of Sir G. G. Stokes, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes (1910-11) of those of Lord Kelvin. Published Aether and Matter (1900) which gained the Adams Prize in the University of Cambridge. In this work he developed an analysis of the dynamical relations of the aether to material systems on the basis of the atomic constitution of matter, and included a discussion of the influence of the earth's motion on optical phenomena. He was also the first to give a formula for the rate of radiation of energy from an accelerated electron, and also to give an explanation of the effect of a magnetic field in splitting the lines of the spectrum into multiple lines