Harry Bateman

Harry Bateman

Infobox Scientist|name= Harry Bateman|birth_date=May 29, 1882|birth_place=Manchester, England|death_date=January 21, 1946|residence=Pasadena, California|citizenship=UK & USA|fields=geometry, differential equations,electromagnetism|doctoral_advisor=Frank Morley|known_for=textbooks, conformal group

Harry Bateman FRS was a leading English mathematician. He first grew to love mathematics at Manchester Grammar School, and in his final year, won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he distinguished himself in 1903 as Senior Wrangler (tied with P.E. Marrack) and by winning the Smith's Prize (1905). He studied in Gottingen and Paris, taught at the University of Liverpool and University of Manchester before moving to the USA in 1910. First he taught at Bryn Mawr College and then Johns Hopkins University. There, working with Frank Morley in geometry, he achieved the Ph.D. In 1917 he took up his permanent position at California Institute of Technology, then still called "Throop Polytechnic Institute".

E.T. Bell says "Like his contemporaries and immediate predecessors among Cambridge mathematicians of the first decade of this century [1900 - 1910] ... Bateman was thoroughly trained in both pure analysis and mathematical physics, and retained an equal interest in both throughout his scientific career."

In 1910 he initiated the study of a "Conformal Group of Spacetime" with his article "The transformation of the electrodynamical equations" (Proc. London Math. Soc. 8:223-264). He showed that the Jacobian matrix of a spacetime diffeomorphism which preserves the Maxwell equations is proportional to an orthogonal matrix, hence conformal. The transformation group of such transformations has "15 parameters" and extends both the Poincare group and the Lorentz group.

For example, Warwick (2005) used this work, and that of Ebenezer Cunningham, as illustrative of Cambridge Maxwellians -- electromagnetic theorists using Maxwell's approach with field equations. These men were, according to Warwick, the bridge to Arthur Eddington's achievements at Cambridge later.

In 1914 Bateman published "The Mathematical Analysis of Electrical and Optical Wave-motion". As Murnaghan explains, this book "is unique and characteristic of the man. Into less than 160 small pages is crowded a wealth of information which would take an expert years to digest."

The following year he published a textbook "Differential Equations", and sometime later "Partial differential equations of mathematical physics". Bateman is also author of "Hydrodynamics" and "Numerical integration of differential equations".

Harry Bateman wrote two significant articles on the history of applied mathematics:
* "The influence of tidal theory upon the development of mathematics"
** National Mathematics Magazine 18:14-26 (1943)
* "Hamilton's work in dynamics and its influence on modern thought"
** Scripta Mathematica 10:51-63 (1944)

In his "Mathematical Analysis of Electrical and Optical Wave-motion" (p.131) he describes the charged-corpuscle trajectory as follows::a corpuscle has a kind of tube or thread attached to it. When the motion of the corpuscle changes a wave or kink runs along the thread; the energy radiated from the corpuscle spreads out in all directions but is concentrated round the thread so that the thread acts as a guiding wire.This figure of speech is not to be confused with a string in physics, for the universes in string theory have dimensions inflated beyond four, something not found in Bateman's work.

Bateman received many honors for his contributions, including election to the Royal Society of London in 1928, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1930. He was elected as vice-president of the American Mathematical Society in 1935. He was on his way to New York to receive an award from the Institute of Aeronautical Science when he died of coronary thrombosis. The "Harry Bateman Research Instructorships" at the California Institute of Technology are named in his honour (see external link below).

See also

* Bateman Manuscript Project

References

* Eric Temple Bell (1946) "Quarterly of Applied Mathematics" 4:105-111. (includes extensive bibliography)
* Arthur Erdélyi, "Journal of the London Mathematical Society" 21:300-310.
* F.D. Murnaghan, " [http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183511507 Harry Bateman (1882-1946)] ", "Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society" 54 (1948) 88-103
* Andrew Warwick (2003) "Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics", University of Chicago Press, pp. 416-23.

External links

*
* [http://www.math.caltech.edu/general/08-09postdoc.html Harry Bateman Research Instructorships]


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