E. T. Whittaker

Edmund Taylor Whittaker ( born October 24, 1873 in Southport, Lancashire, † March 24, 1956 in Edinburgh ) was a British astronomer and mathematician.

Life and work

Edmund Taylor Whittaker made ​​significant research in the field of special features that were of particular interest for mathematical physics. Here is his work A Course of Modern Analysis (1902 and later with his student George Neville Watson as co -author ) to call. His work A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1910, expanded 1953) made ​​him a major historian of science. Controversial, however, was his 1953 devaluation of Einstein's contribution to the special theory of relativity in favor of the Poincaré, from him could not be dissuaded Edinburgh colleague Max Born the same in appearance of the second volume.

Whittaker studied from 1892 at Trinity College, Cambridge with Andrew Russell Forsyth and the astronomer George Howard Darwin. After being in the Tripos "Second Wrangler " ( behind Bromwich) in 1895 was, he was a Fellow of Trinity College in 1896 and 1897 won the first Smith Prize. Whittaker was in Cambridge courses in Analysis, Theoretical Physics and Astronomy, which often returns its current state of his own research. Among his pupils were Godfrey Harold Hardy, James Jeans, Arthur Stanley Eddington, John Edensor Littlewood, Harry Bateman and George Neville Watson. From 1906 he was professor of astronomy at the University of Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, after he had been from 1901 to 1907 secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society. From 1912 to 1946 he was professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. There he established the Edinburgh Mathematical Laboratory for practicing his interest in numerical analysis. This resulted in his 1924 book, The calculus of observations.

In 1902 he found a general solution of the Laplace equation in three dimensions. He also found solutions of the wave equation and the Maxwell equation. He gave the special functions of mathematical physics, a unified treatment of a solution of the hypergeometric differential equation.

Whittaker was married since 1901 and had two daughters and three sons, of whom John Macnaghten Whittaker ( 1905-1984 ) was also a well-known mathematician. With his son Whittaker played a role in the sampling theorem, it is therefore sometimes not only named after Claude Shannon, but also according to Whittaker and Vladimir Kotelnikov.

Honors

1905 Whittaker was admitted as a member of the Royal Society, in 1931, the Sylvester Medal, and in 1954 awarded him the Copley Medal. 1928/29, he was President of the London Mathematical Society in the 1940s and long time president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1922, he became a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. In 1935 he became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences ( after he had converted to Catholicism in 1930 ). In 1945 he was knighted.

The Edinburgh Mathematical Society awards in his honor the Whittaker Prize.

  • Edmund Taylor Whittaker: 1st Edition: A History of the theories of aether and electricity. Longman, Green and Co., Dublin 1910 -. Downloadable In www.archive.org online, but also as a pdf or txt file
  • Edmund Taylor Whittaker: 2nd Edition: A history of the theories of aether and electricity, Tomash, 1956/1987; vol. 1: The classical theories / vol. 2: The modern theories from 1800 to 1950 (very detailed descriptions )
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