Arthur Erdélyi

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

Erdelyi attended grammar school in Hungary until 1926 and then, since he had difficulties studying in his home country as a Jew, went to Czechoslovakia to study electrical engineering in Brno . There he soon switched to mathematics. He published his first work in 1930, which was followed by twenty-eight more by 1937, which was more than enough for a doctorate in 1938 at the German University of Prague . Due to the German occupation, he went to Great Britain in 1938, where Edmund Whittaker gave him a job as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh . It was Whittaker who recommended him to Caltech when Harry Bateman died in 1946 and they wanted to publish his extensive estate on special functions. In 1949 he became a professor at Caltech. In 1964 he returned to Edinburgh as a professor, which he remained until his death in 1977.

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

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

Fonts

• 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, Krieger 1981
• Bateman Manuscript Project: Tables of Integral Transforms, 2 volumes, McGraw Hill 1954

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Arthur Erdélyi. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Arthur Erdélyi in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)