James Hopwood Jeans, an English physicist and astronomer was educated at Merchant Taylor's School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received high honors in mathematics in 1898. He taught mathematics at Cambridge as university lecturer from 1904 to 1905, at Princeton as professor of applied mathematics from 1905 to 1909, and again at Cambridge as Stokes lecturer from 1909 to 1912. In 1912 he resigned all regular offices to live on a private income and later also on the sale of several popular books. He was honorary secretary of the Royal Society, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and professor of astronomy at the Royal Institution.

Jeans was a man of undoubted ability and originality and early won a deservedly high reputation, being elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-eight. His main contributions to science were in two fields: the kinetic...