Early years of genius James Clerk Maxwell who was in love with numbers and nature
The Academy was a relatively new school, which had been open for just 18 years when Maxwell first attended. It was set up to compete with the classical education provided by English public schools. As such, it had a focus on giving its pupils independence and hard discipline alongside a rigid curriculum that focused intensely on the classics with perhaps a spot of maths; there was very little science. As the father of the founder of the Scouting movement Robert Baden-Powell commented in 1832: “Scientific knowledge is rapidly spreading among all classes except the higher, and the consequence must be, that that class will not long remain the higher.”