Eric Temple Bell
| Eric Temple Bell | |
|---|---|
Bell as pictured in Wonder Stories in 1931
|
|
| Born |
February 7, 1883 Peterhead, Scotland, UK |
| Died | December 21, 1960 (aged 77) Watsonville, California, USA |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
University of Washington California Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater |
Stanford University Columbia University (Ph.D.) |
| Doctoral advisor |
Frank Nelson Cole Cassius Keyser |
| Doctoral students |
Howard Percy Robertson Morgan Ward Zhou Peiyuan |
| Known for |
Number theory Bell series Bell polynomials Bell numbers Bell triangle Ordered Bell numbers |
| Notable awards | Bôcher Memorial Prize (1924) |
Eric Temple Bell (February 7, 1883 – December 21, 1960) was a Scottish-born mathematician and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. He published non-fiction using his given name and fiction as John Taine.
Bell was born in Peterhead, Aberdeen, Scotland, but his father, a factor, relocated to San Jose, California in 1884, when he was fifteen months old. The family returned to Bedford, England after his father's death, on January 4, 1896. Bell returned to the United States by way of Montreal in 1902.
Bell was educated at Bedford Modern School, where his teacher Edward Mann Langley inspired him to continue the study of mathematics, Stanford University, the University of Washington, and Columbia University (where he was a student of Cassius Jackson Keyser). He was part of the faculty first at the University of Washington and later at the California Institute of Technology.
He researched number theory; see in particular Bell series. He attempted—not altogether successfully—to make the traditional umbral calculus (understood at that time to be the same thing as the "symbolic method" of Blissard) logically rigorous. He also did much work using generating functions, treated as formal power series, without concern for convergence. He is the eponym of the Bell polynomials and the Bell numbers of combinatorics (but not the "bell curve"). In 1924 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis. He died in 1960 in Watsonville, California.
...
Wikipedia