IMAGINE you are a scientist who has spent his life in pioneering research that has seen you become revered by fellow scientists across the world, only for you, late in your career, to carry out a frankly daft piece of research which then becomes the work for which you become famous.

That is exactly what happened to Peter Guthrie Tait, the Scottish mathematician and physicist who died in this week in 1901.

He had a long and distinguished career but towards the end of it he studied a subject that he really loved – golf. There were no computers in the 1880s and 1890s but somehow Tait developed a diagrammatic model about the trajectory of a golf ball.

He proved conclusively that back spin was the most important element of sending a golf ball further and higher than a mere slap could achieve, and when his account was published in The Scotsman in August 1887, it caused a minor sensation. So much so that the prestigious Nature magazine picked up the story and ran it a month later, and it was Nature which published Tait’s treatise on the subject of the flight of a golf ball in 1891.

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That all his genius in mathematics and physics, not to mention thermodynamics, should be overshadowed by his writings about a golf ball did not concern Tait. Indeed he was delighted with the attention and the fact that his golf research was underpinned by serious maths was appreciated by his fellow scientists.

Peter Tait was born in Dalkeith on April 28, 1831, the son of John Tait who was secretary to the Duke of Buccleuch and his wife Mary née Ronaldson. John Tait died when Peter was a child and his mother took him and his two sisters to live with her brother in Edinburgh. He was encouraged to study astronomy and by 13 he was making observations of the orbits of the moons of Jupiter.

Tait was educated at Edinburgh Academy where a certain James Clerk Maxwell was in the year above him. They would become friends and collaborators for years, but were quite competitive with each other, both winning the Academy’s prize for mathematics in consecutive years.

After studying mathematics and physics at Edinburgh University, Tait went to Peterhouse at Cambridge University and graduated with prize-winning distinction in 1852, so that he became a fellow and lecturer for two years before he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College, Belfast. There he made important connections to leading scientists of the day, including the famous Irish mathematician, physicist and astronomer Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-65) who invented quaternions, number systems used in pure mathematics.

Tait developed a fascination for Hamilton’s quaternions, and in the years ahead he wrote numerous papers on the subject, becoming renowned for his insights.

In 1860, Tait moved to Edinburgh University to replace his former professor, James David Forbes (1809-68) in the chair of natural philosophy. In what was effectively an election he beat his friend Maxwell, reportedly because he outshone Maxwell as a lecturer. Among other achievements Forbes had invented the seismometer so Tait had a lot to live up to.

According to the website of the Clerk Maxwell foundation “the new professor made an impression on all who met him … he had an immense presence.”

Tait began research in experimental physics and by 1864 he had published a paper on thermodynamics. Over in Glasgow, Professor William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) was producing his pioneering work in physics and thermodynamics and Tait lobbied hard to be given the same facilities at Edinburgh.

Perhaps it was the old rivalry between the two cities which encouraged Edinburgh University – then very much a creature of the town council – to secure the funds to build what Tait wanted. Perhaps Thomson winning a knighthood in 1866 also made Edinburgh and Tait a bit envious.

The two men began to meet and correspond regularly and this eventually led to their publication of the Treatise on Natural Philosophy in 1867. Tait did most of the writing and was gratified when it became an immediate hit with the scientific community and the public. It is now recognised as one of the classic scientific text books in history.

His work on knots and what he termed “knottiness” was truly pioneering and the application of maths to knots founded a science – topology. It remains a study for mathematicians to this day.

Tait would go on to write and co-write 16 books in all and their titles explain his focus as it developed during his career – Elements of Natural Philosophy (1872); The Unseen Universe (1875); Sketch of Thermodynamics (1877); Heat (1884); Light (1884); Properties of Matter (1885); Dynamics (1895).

These works and his many different researches into everything from the composition of gases and the efficacy of thermometers – his study influenced the way that temperatures were taken in sea water by the Challenger Expedition – saw Tait acclaimed as one of the greatest scientists of his time.

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Yet it was his friendships with Maxwell and Lord Kelvin which produced some of his finest work as he interpreted their work and even, in the case of Kelvin, produced proofs that the originator could not. They ranked him as their equal, as did many scientists, but he was never given the public approval – no honours, no knighthood – that many thought he deserved. He won plenty prizes during his career.

He was a lifelong golfer and would often travel from his home in Edinburgh to St Andrews, once claiming he played five rounds over the Old Course in a single summer’s day.

His sons Freddie and John by his wife Margaret, née Porter, were both champion amateur golfers and Freddie in particular was recognised as the leading amateur in Britain in the 1890s.

Peter Guthrie Tait died at his home in Edinburgh on July 4, 1901.