Peter Tait (physicist)
Peter Guthrie Tait FRSE was a Scottish mathematical physicist, best known for the energy physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which he cowrote with Kelvin, and his early investigations into knot theory, which contributed to the eventual formation of topology as a mathematical discipline. His name is known in graph theory mainly for Taits conjecture.
He was born in Dalkeith. After attending the Edinburgh Academy and University of Edinburgh, he went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, graduating as senior wrangler and first Smiths prizeman in 1852. As a fellow and lecturer of his college he remained in Cambridge for two years longer, and then left to take up the professorship of mathematics at Queens College, Belfast. There he made the acquaintance of Thomas Andrews, whom he joined in researches on the density of ozone and the action of the electric discharge on oxygen and other gases, and by whom he was introduced to Sir William Rowan Hamilton and quaternions.
Source: Wikipedia