Horatio Scott Carslaw

Horatio Scott Carslaw (born February 12, 1870 in Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire , Scotland , † November 11, 1954 in Burradoo , New South Wales , Australia ) was a Scottish mathematician who was particularly concerned with analysis.

Carslaw was the son of a free church minister and studied mathematics and physics (in addition to philosophy, Latin and Greek) in Glasgow from 1887 , where he also went to school. In 1891 he received his master’s degree with top marks and then attended Emmanuel College at Cambridge University , where he graduated in 1894 (as Fourth Wrangler). In 1896 he was a lecturer at the University of Glasgow . In 1896/97 he attended the universities of Göttingen ( Arnold Sommerfeld ), Rome and Palermo . From 1899 to 1905 he was a fellow at Emmanuel College, but taught in Glasgow. In 1898 he received his masters degree from Cambridge and in 1908 a doctorate (Sc.D.).

In 1903 he went to Australia, where he was professor of mathematics at the University of Sydney . In addition to building up his university education, he also took care of mathematics lessons in schools, after having been the inspector of mathematics in schools in Glasgow.

Carslaw was mainly concerned with Fourier series and their applications in thermal management and also contributed to the spread of Laplace (in Germany at that time Gustav Doetsch goal for) that the operator calculus of Oliver Heaviside was a mathematically precise foundation and had many applications in technology, with in his lectures and his book with Jaeger. His textbook on the Fourier transform was also very popular. It was an early book on more modern real analysis in the English-speaking world.

He was a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and that of New South Wales. He was an Honorary Doctor of Law from the Universities of Adelaide and Glasgow.

Fonts

• An introduction to infinitesimal calculus, 1905
• Introduction to the theory of Fourier's series and integrals and the mathematical theory of the conduction of heat, London 1906, 2nd edition 1921 (where the treatment of heat conduction was separated), Archive
• The Elements of Non-Euclidean Plane Geometry and Trigonometry, London 1916
• with John Conrad Jaeger : Operational methods in applied mathematics, 1941, 1948
• with Jaeger: Conduction of Heat in Solids, Oxford 1947, 1959

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Horatio Scott Carslaw. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• JC Jaeger: Horatio Scott Carslaw . In: Douglas Pike (Ed.): Australian Dictionary of Biography . Melbourne University Press, Carlton (Victoria) 1966–2012 (English).