Macdonald

Hector Munro Macdonald

Born: 19 Jan 1865 in Edinburgh, Scotland
Died: 16 May 1935 in Aberdeen, Scotland 

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Hector Macdonald was educated at Aberdeen and Cambridge. Elected to the Royal Society in 1901, he became professor of mathematics at Aberdeen in 1905, winning the Society's Royal Medal in 1916.

Macdonald worked on electric waves and solved difficult problems regarding diffraction of these waves by summing series of Bessel functions. He corrected his 1903 solution to the problem of a perfectly conducting sphere embedded in an infinite homogeneous dielectric in 1904 after a subtle error was pointed out by Poincaré.

References:

  1. E T Whittaker, Hector Munro Macdonald, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society of London I (1932-35), 551-558. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996