WHITTAKER, SIR EDMUND TAYLOR

born Oct. 24, 1873, Southport, Lancashire, Eng. died March 24, 1956, Edinburgh, Scot. English mathematician who made pioneering contributions to the area of the special functions, which is of particular interest in mathematical physics. Whittaker became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1896. After being elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1905, he was appointed the following year professor of astronomy at the University of Dublin and Astronomer Royal of Ireland. He served as professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh from 1912 until his retirement in 1946. He was knighted in 1945. Whittaker excelled not only in mathematics but also as a historian of science. His prolific mathematical contributions were in mathematical physics as well as in dynamical problems, and his work on differential equations and functions had great influence. His A Course of Modern Analysis (1902; 2nd ed., 1915) advanced the study of functions of a complex variable and their expansions and the study of special functions and their related differential equations. He discovered in 1902 the general solution of Laplace's equation and the following year originated the confluent hypergeometric function, which has found numerous uses and has developed an extensive literature. In A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1910), expanded in 1953 to include the first quarter of the 20th century, Whittaker showed the philosophic depth behind his mathematical thought. On the eve of the revolution in physics brought on by the theory of relativity, he published A Treatise on the Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies, with an Introduction to the Problem of Three Bodies (1904), an epoch-making summary of classical dynamics. He also contributed pioneering work on the effects of the relativistic curved space on electromagnetic phenomena. Having adopted the Roman Catholic faith in 1930, he wrote several works on the relationship between science and natural theology.