Edmund Taylor Whittaker

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Edmund Taylor Whitakker (by Arthur Trevor Haddon)

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

Live and act

Edmund Taylor Whittaker made significant research in the field of special functions of particular interest to mathematical physics . His work A Course of Modern Analysis (1902, later co-authored with his student George Neville Watson ) should be mentioned here. 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 an important historian of science. When the second volume was published in 1953, however, its devaluation of Albert Einstein's contribution to the special theory of relativity in favor of that of Henri Poincaré , from which even his Edinburgh colleague Max Born could not dissuade him, was controversial .

Whittaker studied from 1892 at Trinity College in Cambridge with Andrew Russell Forsyth and the astronomer George Howard Darwin . After he was in the Tripos "Second Wrangler" (behind Bromwich) in 1895 , he became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1896 and in 1897 won the first Smith Prize . Whittaker gave courses in analysis, theoretical physics and astronomy at Cambridge, which often reflected the current state of his own research. His students included 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 Astronomer Royal of Ireland, after he was secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1901 to 1907 . From 1912 to 1946 he was Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University . There he set up the Edinburgh Mathematical Laboratory to put his interest in numerical analysis into practice. This resulted in his book The calculus of observations in 1924 .

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

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

Honors

In 1905 Whittaker was accepted as a member of the Royal Society , which awarded him the New Year's Medal in 1931 and the Copley Medal in 1954 . In 1928/29 he was President of the London Mathematical Society and in the 1940s he was President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for a long time . 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 converting to Catholicism in 1930). In 1945 he was beaten to Knight Bachelor ("Sir"). A few days before his death he became a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences .

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

Fonts

  • with George Neville Watson : A Course of modern analysis, Cambridge University Press 1902, Archive (1st edition still without Watson, many editions, e.g. AMS Press 1979)
  • A History of the theories of aether and electricity: From the age of Descartes to the close of the nineteenth century, London: Longman, Green and Co., 1910, Archive ,
    • In 1951 Whittaker published a second edition with a second volume in 1953 (published by Nelson in London), which covered the period from 1900 to 1926, new editions of the second edition in 2 volumes: Tomash Publ./American Institute of Physics, 1987, Dover 1989
  • Whittaker Analytical Dynamics of Points and Rigid Bodies , Springer 1924
    • English original: A Treatise on the Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies. First Edition, Cambridge 1904, 1917.
  • Whittaker principles of perturbation theory and general theory of trajectories in dynamic systems , Enzykl. the mathem. Sciences 1912
  • A Short Course in Interpolation. London 1923.
  • The Calculus of Observations: A treatise on numerical mathematics, London: Blackie and Son 1924 (4th edition with G. Robinson, Dover 1967)
  • Introduction to the theory of optical instruments, Leipzig: Barth 1926
    • English original: The Theory of Optical Instruments, Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics No. 7, Cambridge 1907.
  • From Euclid to Eddington, Vienna: Humboldt Verlag 1952 (English: From Euclid to Eddington: A Study of Conceptions of the External World. Dover 1958)
  • The beginning and the end of the world, Stuttgart 1955 (English: The Beginning and End of the World. Riddell Memorial Lectures, Fourteenth Series. Oxford 1942)
  • Space and Spirit: Theories of the Universe and the Arguments for the Existence of God. 1946.
  • Eddington's Principle in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge 1951.

Some leprosy:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Einstein, Born Briefwechsel .
  2. ↑ Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
  3. ^ List of former members since 1666: Letter W. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 15, 2020 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Whittaker, Edmund Taylor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Southport , Lancashire , England
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1956
Place of death Edinburgh , Scotland