The Story Behind Our Name

‘How did you hit upon the name BlueVector?’, you might ask.

Well, for a start, we like the colour blue conjuring up images of clear, refreshing water and bright skies.

'Vectors' nicely encapsulate our complementary technical strengths across the life sciences, computing and engineering. Vectors are important tools in molecular biology and are used to deliver gene therapies. In the computing world, they define paths in images where they are the basis, for example, of vector graphics.

Mathematically, vectors define velocity through specification of direction and magnitude, and are represented by arrows: hence our strapline ‘define Direction, create Magnitude’ and the arrow in the logo.

James Clerk Maxwell, the greatest mathematical physicist since Newton (but strangely a bit of an unsung hero), was born right here in the New Town of Edinburgh in 1831, just a stone’s throw from our office. James Clerk Maxwell is the ‘man who changed everything’ and it was he who, among many other amazing accomplishments, produced a unified theory of electromagnetism, 'A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.' This paved the way for most of the modern inventions that we take for granted, such as television and mobile telephones.

His particular gift was the ability to see phenomena in terms of relationships which could be defined by equations, if necessary abandoning a physical analogy. He invented the term 'curl' for the vector operator that appears in his equations for the electromagnetic field, which so elegantly captured the essence of electromagnetism.

So there you have it, the story behind the BlueVector name!

More about James Clerk Maxwell