Ebenezer Cunningham

Ebenezer Cunningham ( born May 7, 1881 in Hackney, † February 12, 1977 ) was a British mathematician and theoretical physicist.

Life and work

Cunningham studied from 1899 with a scholarship at St. John's College, University of Cambridge ( among others, Henry Frederick Baker and Joseph Larmor ), where he was first in the 1902 Tripos examinations (Senior Wrangler ). In 1904 he won the Smith Prize, was a Fellow of St. John 's College and was a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. From 1907 he was with Karl Pearson at University College London. In 1911 he went back to the St. John 's College, Cambridge, where he was a Lecturer from 1926 to 1946.

It dealt with the influence of the reading of Larmor 's " Aether and Matter " and Einstein's work of 1905 with Relativätstheorie. An essay by Cunningham from 1907 is the earliest mention of Einstein's work on special relativity in England. Cunningham showed about the same time as Harry Bateman, the conformal invariance of the Maxwell equations. He wrote in 1914 one of the first English-language textbooks on relativity theory, where in 1915 and 1921, others followed.

Cunningham was the Boer War pacifist since the time and refused in World War I military service. He also had leading positions within the Congregational Church, was a member of Emmanuel Congregational Church and 1953/54, Chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. In this function, he also took part in the coronation procession of Elizabeth II in 1953.