Person: Bateman, Harry
Harry Bateman was an English mathematician who did extensive work in analysis -- particularly on Special Functions and Integral Transforms.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Harry attended Manchester Grammar School where he first grew to love mathematics, and in his final year he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.
- Bateman was awarded a Smith's prize in 1905 for an essay on differential equations.
- Bateman began publishing mathematics while he was still an undergraduate.
- During the years 1905 and 1906 Bateman travelled on the continent, visiting Paris and Göttingen.
- This prompted Bateman to use the methods being developed there to study the propagation of earthquake waves.
- Bateman emigrated to the United States in 1910 having published four papers in 1909 and seventeen papers in 1910.
- The appointment of Bateman was a brilliant move to bring an extremely active young research mathematician into the College.
- There is one strange aspect to Bateman's career which will not be evident from our description above.
- When Bateman arrived there in 1917 the College had gone through a marked transition.
- A number of superb appointments, such as that of Bateman and also the physicist Robert A Millikan, helped achieve Hale's aim.
- Some of Bateman's early work was on geometry and the influence of geometry on all his work is evident.
- Bateman was one of the first to apply Laplace transforms to integral equations in 1906.
- Bateman's method was the now familiar one of applying the complex inversion formula of the Laplace transform.
- The finest contribution Bateman made to mathematics, however, was his work on transformations of partial differential equations, in particular his general solutions containing arbitrary functions.
- The "Guide to the Functions" which Bateman planned would have been invaluable.
- Office of Naval Research pooled their resources to continue Bateman's task.
- It turned out that no single section of Bateman's work was in a state suitable for immediate publication, and the field was so wide that it appeared essential to narrow it down if anything useful was to be accomplished.
- The whole work has been carried out by the staff of the Bateman Manuscript Project, under the directorship of Arthur Erdélyi.
- In all Bateman published around 200 papers in a period of 40 years.
- Bateman received many honours for his contributions, including election to the Royal Society of London in 1928 and election to the National Academy of Sciences in Washington in 1930.
Born 29 May 1882, Manchester, England. Died 21 January 1946, Pasadena, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin England
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
