JEANS, SIR JAMES HOPWOOD

(September 11, 1877–September 16, 1946), was an English physicist and astronomer. He studied the nature of gases and sun radiations. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge University, he became a professor at Princeton University in the area of applied mathematics, and later a professor at Cambridge. He was a research associate at the Mount Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, California, 1923–44; Secretary of the Royal Society; president of the Royal Astronomical Society of England; and was knighted in 1928. His works include: The Universe Around Us, 1929; The Mysterious Universe, 1930; and Physics and Philosophy, 1942.

In his work, The Mysterious Universe, 1930, Sir James Hopwood Jeans stated:

All the pictures which science now draws of nature and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact are mathematical pictures. … From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.3276