James Clerk Maxwell was neither a showman nor a polemicist, yet his work quietly unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single mathematical framework. In translating Faraday’s experimental insight into formal law, he created the foundations of modern physics and marked the moment Victorian science became something recognisably modern.
Augustus De Morgan was not a man of spectacle or invention, but of discipline and structure. In an age defined by engines, experiments, and discovery, he focused instead on ensuring that ideas behaved correctly. His work formalised the rules of logic, shaped Victorian mathematics, and quietly laid foundations that modern algorithms still rely on. Though often overlooked, De Morgan’s influence persists wherever reasoning must remain precise, consistent, and accountable.
Michael Faraday was an experimental genius whose discoveries revealed the invisible forces of electricity and magnetism. Working without advanced mathematics or privilege, he transformed scientific curiosity into practical laws that still shape the modern world.
Charles Babbage was a visionary mathematician and engineer whose unfinished machines laid the conceptual foundations of modern computing. Brilliant, exacting, and frequently at odds with his contemporaries, he imagined programmable calculation long before the technology existed to realise it.