Thomson was in Paris undergoing the final stages of an education designed from boyhood to prepare him for scientific greatness. Born in Belfast in 1824, he’d moved to Glasgow eight years later with his family when his father had been appointed mathematics professor at the city’s university. Aged fifteen, Thomson won the class prize at the same institution for an analysis of how the earth’s shape had formed. A year later his precocious mathematical talent further manifested when he encountered The Analytical Theory of Heat by the French polymath Joseph Fourier.
