Year 1831 (MDCCCXXXI) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian Calendar and a common year starting on Thursday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar.
James Clerk Maxwell of GlenlairFRS FRSE (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottishphysicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This unites all previously unrelated observations, experiments, and equations of electricity, magnetism, and optics into a consistent theory.Maxwell's equations demonstrate that electricity, magnetism and light are all manifestations of the same phenomenon, namely the electromagnetic field. Subsequently, all other classic laws or equations of these disciplines became simplified cases of Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's achievements concerning electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics", after the first one realised by Isaac Newton.
Maxwell demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in the form of waves and at the constant speed of light. In 1865, Maxwell published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. It was with this that he first proposed that light was in fact undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. His work in producing a unified model of electromagnetism is one of the greatest advances in physics.
Franz Krommer (Czech: František Vincenc Kramář) (November 27, 1759, Kamenice u Jihlavy – January 8, 1831, Vienna) was a Czech composer of classical music, whose seventy-year life began the year of the death of George Frideric Handel and ended a few years after that of Ludwig van Beethoven.
The main events of his life were somewhat as follows:
He may have been Kapellmeister as early as 1814. (This article also shows or at least suggests that Beethoven's opinion towards such music of Krommer's as he heard was poor.)
His output was prolific, with at least three hundred published compositions in at least 110 opus numbers including at least five symphonies, seventy string quartets and many others for winds and strings, about fifteen string quintets ([1]) and much music for winds by themselves and with other instruments, for which he has perhaps become best-known.
Compiled from Library of Congress records (of scores, parts or recordings. Note that some works by Krommer were published with the same Op. number.) also from WorldCat.
Friedrich Adolf Ferdinand, Freiherr von Flotow (27 April 1812 – 24 January 1883) was a German composer. He is chiefly remembered for his opera Martha, which was popular in the 19th century.
Flotow was born in Teutendorf, in Mecklenburg, into an aristocratic family. He studied at the Conservatoire de Paris and came under the influence of Auber, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Halévy, and later Gounod and Offenbach. These influences are reflected in his operas, where a distinctive French opéra comique flavour exists.
He completed his first opera in 1835, Pierre et Cathérine, but his breakthrough came with Le naufrage de la Méduse (1839), based on the wreck of the warship Méduse. The three-act romantic opera Alessandro Stradella of 1844 is recognized as one of Flotow's finer works. Martha was first staged in Vienna at the Theater am Kärntnertor on 25 November 1847.
Between 1856 and 1863 Flotow served as Intendant of the court theatre at Schwerin. He spent his last years in Paris and Vienna and had the satisfaction of seeing his operas mounted as far away as Saint Petersburg and Turin. He died in Darmstadt at the age of 70.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German pronunciation: [ˈɡeɔɐ̯k ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡəl]) (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.
Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of Absolute idealism to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed the concept that mind or spirit manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.
Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Strauss, Bauer, Feuerbach, T. H. Green, Marx, Engels, Vygotsky, F. H. Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Croce, Küng, Kojève, Fukuyama, Žižek, Brandom, Iqbal) and his detractors (Schopenhauer, Herbart, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Nietzsche, Peirce, Popper, Russell, Heidegger). His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic", "absolute idealism", "Spirit", negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life" and the importance of history.