Person: Slater, Noel Bryan
Noel Slater was an English mathematician who worked on the theory of chemical reactions.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Not surprisingly, Albert Slater was somewhat embarrassed by this and used the name D Albert Slater.
- Slater was brought up in Blackburn where, after attending elementary school, he attended Blackburn Grammar School.
- Although he did not obtain his doctorate until 1941, Slater had been appointed as an Observer at the Solar Physics Observatory in Cambridge in 1939.
- After the War ended in 1945, Slater took up his career again when he was appointed as a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds.
- Slater continued to develop the work he undertook for his doctorate which led him to study a mathematical model for chemical reactions for many years.
- Slater summarised his finding in this area in the monograph Theory of unimolecular reactions which was published in 1959.
- This is obviously closely linked to Slater's problem, but in fact it arose in an astronomical context, namely the "mean motion problem" of celestial mechanics.
- To his surprise and pleasure he received a letter from Slater telling him that his formula, which Kac thought was "entirely useless", had opened the door to a new attack on an important chemical problem.
- Also in 1973, in another joint work with T C T Kotiah, Slater published On two-server Poisson queues with two types of customers.
- Other mathematical papers by Slater include Some formulae of P Stein and others concerning trigonometrical sums (1954) and General forms of Nielsen's Bessel-function identity (1962).
- It remains for us to comment on one remaining, but important, aspect of Slater's contributions.
- What is important in the long term about Slater's own achievement is that it provides us with an authentic snapshot of the competing concepts simultaneously present and wrestling for expression in the mind of a great creative genius.
Born 29 July 1912, Blackburn, Lancashire, England. Died 31 January 1973, Hull, England.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Astronomy, Origin England
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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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
