"But the mathematicians of the nineteenth century failed miserably to grasp the equally great opportunity offered to them in 1865 by Maxwell. If they had taken Maxwell's equations to heart as Euler took Newton's, they would have discovered, among other things, Einstein's theory of special relativity, the theory of s and their linear representations, and probably large pieces of the theory of hyperbolic differential equations and functional analysis. A great part of twentieth century physics and mathematics could have been created in the nineteenth century, simply by exploring to the end the mathematical concepts to which Maxwell's equations naturally lead."
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Dyson, Freeman J. Missed opportunities. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 78 (1972), no. 5, 635--652. http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183533964.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations
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