John Taine

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Eric Temple Bell (born February 7, 1883 in Peterhead , Scotland , † December 21, 1960 in Watsonville , California ) was a Scottish-American science fiction author and mathematician who wrote books on the history of mathematics and numerous works on number theory , combinatorics and published analysis . As an author, he was best known under his pseudonym John Taine .

Life

Bell had lived in the United States since 1903. He attended Stanford University and Columbia University . From 1912 he taught mathematics at the University of Washington and later at the California Institute of Technology . In 1924 he received the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his essay Arithmetical Paraphrases . In 1927 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1937 he became an elected member of the American Philosophical Society .

According to him, which was Bell's number designated to the number of partitions describes an n-set.

Bell became known to a wider audience primarily for his books, particularly for his classic collection of mathematicians' biographies Men of Mathematics (1937), which is still reprinted today. Other publications include Algebraic Arithmetic (1927), The Development of Mathematics (1940) and Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science (1951).

In addition to his mathematical work and books, Bell was also a well-known science fiction author under the pseudonym John Taine, who published thirteen novels and a few short stories in the three decades from 1924 to 1954. Taine's first novel was The Purple Sapphire (1924), a forgotten world story set in Tibet, where a hidden race rules nuclear power. In the second novel, The Gold Tooth (1927), another ancient race is able to transmute metals , the secret of which almost falls into the hands of the Japanese, but this can be thwarted and the protagonists gain inexhaustible wealth through gold production.

His best stories are a number of novels dealing with the questions and dangers of biological development and change, including The Greatest Adventure (1929), in which spores dormant in Antarctica are released and the earth grows uncontrollably and The Iron Star (1930), in which a meteorite impact in the Congo reversed the direction of human evolution, turning humans back into apes. A German translation of The Iron Star was in preparation around 1980 in the Science Fiction Classics series under the title Der Eisenstern , but it apparently never appeared. The novels Seeds of Life (1931) and GOG 666 (1954) deal with the dangers of human self-modification.

Bell died in 1960 at the age of 77.

bibliography

Science Fiction (as John Taine)

Novels
  • The Purple Sapphire (1924)
  • The Gold Tooth (1927)
  • Quayle's Invention (1927)
  • Green Fire: The Story of the Terrible Days in the Summer of 1990: Now Told in Full for the First Time (1928)
  • The Greatest Adventure (1929)
  • The Iron Star (1930)
  • The White Lily (1930, also as The Crystal Horde , 1952)
  • The Time Stream (1931)
  • Seeds of Life (1931)
  • Before the Dawn (1934)
  • Tomorrow (1939)
  • The Forbidden Garden (1947)
  • GOG 666 (1954)
collection
  • The Cosmic Geoids: and One Other (1949)
Short stories
  • The Ultimate Catalyst (1939)
  • The Black Goldfish (1948)
  • The Cosmic Geoids (1949)

Mathematical Writings (as Eric Temple Bell)

Essays and Articles
Textbooks and non-fiction
  • An Arithmetical Theory of Certain Numerical Functions (1915)
  • The Cyclotomic Quinary Quintic (1912)
  • Algebraic Arithmetic (1927)
  • Debunking Science (1930)
  • The Queen of the Sciences (1931)
  • Numerology (1933)
  • The Search for Truth (1934)
  • The Handmaiden of the Sciences (1937)
  • Man and His Lifebelts (1938)
  • Men of Mathematics (1937)
    • German: The great mathematicians. Econ, Düsseldorf & Vienna 1967.
  • The Development of Mathematics (1940)
  • The Magic of Numbers (1946)
  • Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1951)
  • The Last Problem (1961)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ivo Gloss, Jörg Neumann: "Could have been!" Beginning of a bibliography of science fiction that does not exist , accessed September 26, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Taine, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bell, Eric Temple (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Peterhead , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1960
Place of death Watsonville , California