Watson

George Neville Watson

Born: 31 Jan 1886 in Westward Ho!, Devon, England
Died: 2 Feb 1965 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England

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Watson was educated at Cambridge where he was a pupil of Whittaker and graduated in 1907, becoming a Fellow of Trinity in 1910. From 1918 to 1951 he was professor at Birmingham.

Watson worked on a wide variety of topics, all within the area of complex variable theory, such as difference equations, differential equations, number theory and special functions. He is best known as a joint author with Whittaker of A Course of Modern Analysis published in 1915. The first edition of the book has only Whittaker as an author.

Watson undertook a major work on Ramanujan's notebooks, extending his results and supplying proofs. He enjoyed numerical calculations and spent many happy hours doing numerical work on his calculating machine. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1919.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. R A Rankin, George Neville Watson, J. London Math. Soc. 41 (1966), 551-565.
  3. J M Whittaker, George Neville Watson, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 12 (1966), 521-530.
  4. Obituary, Yearbook of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Session 1964-65 (1966), 37-39.
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JOC/EFR February 1996