Treatise on Natural Philosophy was an 1867 text book by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and Peter Guthrie Tait, published by Oxford University Press.
The Treatise was often referred to as and , as explained by Alexander Macfarlane:
Treatise on Natural Philosophy was an 1867 text book by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and Peter Guthrie Tait, published by Oxford University Press.
The Treatise was often referred to as and , as explained by Alexander Macfarlane:
Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe, while ignoring any supernatural influence. It was dominant before the development of modern science.
From the ancient world (at least since Aristotle) until the 19th century, natural philosophy was the common term for the study of physics (nature), a broad term that included botany, zoology, anthropology, and chemistry as well as what is now called physics. It was in the 19th century that the concept of science received its modern shape, with different subjects within science emerging, such as astronomy, biology, and physics. Institutions and communities devoted to science were founded. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) (English: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) reflects the use of the term natural philosophy in the 17th century. Even in the 19th century, the work that helped define much of modern physics bore the title Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).
Peter Guthrie Tait FRSE (28 April 1831 – 4 July 1901) was a Scottish mathematical physicist and early pioneer in thermodynamics. He is best known for the mathematical physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which he co-wrote with Lord Kelvin, and his early investigations into knot theory.
His work on knot theory contributed to the eventual formation of topology as a mathematical discipline. His name is known in graph theory mainly for Tait's conjecture on cubic graphs. He is also one of the namesakes of the Tait–Kneser theorem on osculating circles.