Wilfrid Norman Bailey

Wilfrid Norman Bailey (born September 5, 1893 in Consett , County Durham, † October 23, 1961 in Eastbourne ) was a British mathematician who dealt with analysis , especially hypergeometric series .

Bailey studied (after winning a scholarship in mathematics) from 1912 at Cambridge University , where he completed the Tripos exams in 1913 and received a senior scholarship. His teachers included Godfrey Harold Hardy , John Edensor Littlewood , George Neville Watson , Ebenezer Cunningham, and Ernest William Barnes, and he met frequently with fellow student S. Ramanujan . In the second part of the Tripos exams in 1915, he became a Wrangler and received a scholarship (Jeston Exhibition), which he gave up to serve in the Navy during World War I. He was an instructor at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, during which time he received his bachelor's degree from the University of London. In 1916 he served on the HMS Vincent in the Battle of Skagerrak . In 1918 he married and in 1919 went back to Greenwich as a lecturer in navigation, where he received his Masters degree from the University of London and an MA in Cambridge (also in 1919). He became a lecturer at the University of Birmingham and a year later a lecturer at Victoria University Manchester. In 1932 he was there Senior Richardson Lecturer (under Louis Mordell ). In a sabbatical year at Cambridge University in 1934/35, he completed his book on generalized hypergeometric series. In 1944 he became a professor at Bedford College, University of London. In 1958 he retired.

In 1931 he received a D.Sc. from Victora University Manchester and 1936 Sc. D. Cambridge University. His work on hypergeometric series was inspired by the work of Ramanujan (including generalization of the Rogers-Ramanujan identities ).

1956/57 he was Vice President of the London Mathematical Society , which he also served in various other positions.

Lucy Joan Slater is among his PhD students (and Freeman Dyson is among his students ).

Fonts

• Generalized hypergeometric series, Cambridge Mathematical Tract 32, Cambridge University Press 1932

literature

• Lucy Joan Slater: Wilfrid Norman Bailey, Journal of the London Mathematical Society. Second Series, Vol. 37, 1962, pp. 504-512

Web links

• Wilfrid Norman Bailey in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)