William Hamilton Maxwell (1792 - 1850) was a Scots-Irish novelist.
He was born at Newry, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He entered the army, and saw service in the Peninsula, and was at the Battle of Waterloo. Afterwards he took orders, but was deprived of his living for non-residence. His novels, O'Hara, and Stories from Waterloo, started the school of rollicking military fiction, which culminated in the novels of Lever. Maxwell also wrote a Life of the Duke of Wellington (1839-1841), and a History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (1845).
Maxwell developed a set of equations expressing the basic laws of electricity and magnetism as well as the Maxwell distribution in the kinetic theory of gases.
In 1854, Maxwell graduated with a degree as second wrangler in mathematics from Trinity (scoring second-highest in the mathematics exam) and was declared equal with the senior wrangler of his year in the higher ordeal of the Smith's prize examination.
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