Eric Harold Neville

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Eric Harold Neville (born January 1, 1889 in London , † August 22, 1961 in Reading ) was a British mathematician.

Life

Neville studied from 1907 at Trinity College, Cambridge University . In 1909 he was Second Wrangler in the Tripos exams and received a Trinity Fellowship. Here he also met Godfrey Harold Hardy and Bertrand Russell . 1914 was a visiting professor in India and convinced S. Ramanujan , who was reluctant to leave India, to go to Cambridge at the invitation of Hardy. Since he refused to fight in World War I (although he probably would not have come to the front because of visual problems) and openly declared his pacifism (like Bertrand Russell) he lost his Fellow status at Trinity in 1919 and went to University College in Reading . He built up a mathematics faculty there and achieved that the college got university status in 1926 and could award doctorates. In 1954 he retired in Reading.

Initially, he dealt with differential geometry in Cambridge, where he expanded, among other things, the three-legged method of Gaston Darboux , and dealt under the influence of Bertrand Russell with the fundamentals of mathematics, especially the logical and axiomatic foundations of analytical geometry, about which he published a book . Later he dealt with elliptic functions and in 1944 he wrote his most famous work on Jacobian elliptic functions.

From 1926 to 1931 he was on the Council of the London Mathematical Society and in 1950 President of Section A (Mathematics and Physics) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science . He headed their committee for mathematical tables and published two tables himself (about Farey series and conversion tables from right-angled to polar coordinates). He published a lot in the Mathematical Gazette, of which he was editor for a short time in the late 1920s.

He was also active in mathematics education and, together with his former teacher TP Nunn, was primarily responsible for a report by the Mathematical Association on the reform of geometry teaching in schools (1922). For a long time he was the librarian of the Mathematical Association and in 1934 its president. In 1932 and again in 1936 he was elected to the central committee of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI).

Others

Neville was the last second wrangler in the Tripos Cambridge exams, that is, second after Percy John Daniell and before Louis Mordell . After that, Hardy prevailed, who saw the exams as an obstacle in mathematician training and achieved an only alphabetical listing of the Wranglers.

Fonts

  • Multilinear functions of direction, and their uses in differential geometry , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1921
  • The fourth dimension , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1921
  • Prolegomena to analytical geometry in anisotropic Euclidean space of three dimensions , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1922
  • Jacobian elliptic functions, Oxford , Clarendon Press 1944, 2nd edition 1951
  • The Farey series of order 1025. Displaying solutions of the Diophantine equation by - ax = 1 , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1950
  • Rectangular-polar conversion tables , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1956

literature

  • TAA Broadbent Eric Harold Neville , Journal of the London Mathematical Society, Volume 37, 1962, pp. 479-482
  • WJ Langford Professor Eric Harold Neville, MA, B.Sc .: The man , The Mathematical Gazette, Volume 48, 1964, pp. 131-136

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So the title of a biographical portrait of Neville by Marjorie Senechal in Chandler Davis, Marjorie Senechal, Jan Zwicky (ed.) The shape of content , AK Peters 2008
personal data
SURNAME Neville, Eric Harold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH August 22, 1961
Place of death Reading