Harry Bateman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harry Bateman FRS (May 29, 1882 Manchester, England - January 21, 1946 Pasadena California USA) 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. There he taught at Bryn Mawr College and Johns Hopkins University. In 1913 the latter institution bestowed upon him a Ph.D. degree (he already had considerable mathematical eminence). In 1917 he took up his permanent position at California Institute of Technology.

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:

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).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Languages