G. N. Watson

George Neville Watson ( born January 31, 1886 in Westward Ho, Devon; ! † February 2nd 1965 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire ) was an English mathematician who worked on Analysis.

Life and work

George Neville Watson was the son of the school rector and genealogists ( co-editor of The Complete Peerage ) George Wentworth Watson. He went to St Paul 's School in London, where John Edensor Littlewood was his classmate and where he was a pupil of Francis Macaulay. In 1904 he began after he won a scholarship to study at Trinity College of Cambridge University, where Edmund Whittaker, Ernest William Barnes and Godfrey Harold Hardy were his teachers. In 1907 he completed his studies as Senior Wrangler. In 1909 he won the Smith Prize and a year later became a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1914 he became an assistant lecturer at the University of Birmingham and 1918 Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics at Birmingham, where he remained until his retirement in 1951.

Watson worked on special functions, differential and difference equations, function theory, asymptotic expansions and number theory. He is still known today as the co -author of A course of modern analysis with Whittaker, the first appeared in 1915 ( in the first edition still without Watson on the cover ) and long the standard textbook in higher analysis was not only in England. 1922 Watson appeared monograph A Theory of Bessel Functions.

In 1918 he showed that a previously used simplified model of the propagation of radio waves on earth is incomplete as long as the spread in the by Oliver Heaviside in 1902 postulated layer in the ionosphere (km in about 100 height as Watson predicted ) is not taken into account. 1923 and Heaviside his prediction was confirmed experimentally.

Watson was intensively occupied with the publication of the journals of the genius, who died mathematician Ramanujan, who worked in Cambridge with Hardy and Littlewood. Watson published several works, which were based on observations of Ramanujan. He had a passion for numerical computation, stamps, schedules of all kinds and especially the railroad.

In 1919 he was admitted as a member ( "Fellow" ) to the Royal Society, in 1946, the Sylvester Medal awarded him. 1919 to 1933 he was secretary from 1933 to 1935 and President of the London Mathematical Society (LMS ), whose proceedings he edited until 1946. In 1947 he was awarded the De Morgan Medal of the LMS. He was an honorary member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

It is usually simply cited as G. N. Watson.

George Neville Watson was married since 1925 and had a son.