Whittaker

Edmund Taylor Whittaker

Born: 24 Oct 1873 in Southport, Lancashire, England
Died: 24 March 1956 in Edinburgh, Scotland

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Whittaker was a Cambridge graduate and became Astronomer Royal of Ireland in 1906, then in 1912 he took up Chrystal's chair in Edinburgh and remained in Edinburgh for the rest of his career. His eldest daughter married Copson. He was knighted in 1945.

Whittaker is best known work is in analysis, in particular numerical analysis, but he also worked on celestial mechanics and the history of applied mathematics and physics.

His A Course of Modern Analysis (1902) is important in the study of functions of a complex variable. It also studies special functions and their related differential equations.

One of his most important historical studies was A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1910). In 1953 he produced a revised version including the work of the first 1900 to 1925.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Whittaker Memorial Volume, Proc. Edinburgh Math. Soc. 11 (1958), 1-70.
  4. G F J Temple, Edmund Taylor Whittaker, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 2 (1956), 299-325.
  5. W H McCrea, Edmund Taylor Whittaker, J. London Math. Soc. 32 (1957), 234-256. 
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