Arthur Erdélyi

Arthur Erdélyi ( born October 2, 1908 in Budapest, † December 12, 1977 in Edinburgh ) was a Hungarian- British mathematician who worked on analysis and in particular with special functions.

Erdelyi attended high school in Hungary until 1926 and then went, as he had as a Jew difficulties to study in his home country, to Czechoslovakia to study electrical engineering in Brno. There, however, he soon switched to mathematics. He published his first work in 1930, the twenty-eight others followed until 1937, which is more than sufficient for a doctorate in 1938. Because of the German occupation in 1938 he went to Britain, where he got a job as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh by Edmund Whittaker. Whittaker was also the recommended him to Caltech as Harry Bateman died in 1946 and you wanted to publish his extensive estate special features. In 1949 he became a professor at Caltech. In 1964 he returned as a professor to Edinburgh, where he stayed until his death in 1977.

Erdélyi was a leading expert in the field of special functions: with Fritz upper Hettinger, Wilhelm Magnus and Francesco Tricomi he published the volumes of the Bateman Manuscript Project.

In 1945 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society in 1977. In 1953 he became member of the Academy of Sciences in Turin.

Writings

• Asymptotic expansions, Dover 1955
• Operational calculus and generalized functions, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1962
• Bateman Manuscript Project: Higher transcendental functions, 3 volumes, McGraw Hill 1953 to 1955, Warrior 1981
• Bateman Manuscript Project: Tables of Integral Transforms, 2 volumes, McGraw Hill 1954