George Neville Watson

George Neville Watson (* 31 January 1886 in Westward Ho! , Devon , † 2. February 1965 in Leamington Spa , Warwickshire ) was an English mathematician who deals with analysis employed.

Live and act

George Neville Watson was the son of the school principal and genealogist (Associate 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 student of Francis Macaulay . In 1904 he began after he won a scholarship at Trinity College of Cambridge University to study where Edmund Whittaker , Ernest William Barnes and Godfrey Harold Hardy his teachers were. In 1907 he graduated as a 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 in 1918 Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics in Birmingham, where he remained until his retirement in 1951.

Watson worked on special functions, differential and difference equations, function theory, asymptotic developments, and number theory. He is still known today as the co-author of A course of modern analysis with Whittaker, which first appeared in 1902 (in the first edition still without Watson on the title) and for a long time was the standard textbook of higher analysis not only in England. In 1922 Watson's monograph A theory of Bessel Functions was published .

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

Watson was busy editing the notebooks of the brilliant mathematician S. Ramanujan , who died early and who worked with Hardy and Littlewood in Cambridge. Watson published several papers that built on Ramanujan's observations. He had a passion for numerical arithmetic, postage stamps, schedules of all kinds and especially the railroad.

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

He is mostly quoted simply as GN Watson.

George Neville Watson had been married since 1925 and had one son.

literature

• Bruce Berndt , Blair Spearman, Kenneth S. Williams, editors ( Comments on an unpublished lecture of GN Watson "On solving the quintic" ) by GN Watson: On solving the quintic. Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 24, 2002, No. 4 (explicit method for determining the zeros of an equation of the 5th degree, if it can be solved)

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  George Neville Watson. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .