Hector Munro Macdonald (19 January 1865 – 16 May 1935) was a Scottish mathematician, born in Edinburgh in 1865.

However, not long after he began his schooling in the Scottish capital, the family moved to a farm near Hill of Fearn, in Easter Ross.

After studying mathematics at Aberdeen University, he graduated with First Class Honours in 1886 and won a Fullerton Scholarship.

[2] In 1901 he received the Adams Prize and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (FRS).

He corrected his 1903 solution to the problem of a perfectly conducting sphere embedded in an infinite homogeneous dielectric in 1904 after a subtle error was pointed out by Poincaré.

About the time that Macdonald published his prize winning essay on electric waves, Guglielmo Marconi was successful in the transmission of the first wireless signals across the Atlantic.