Harry Bateman
| Harry Bateman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
29 May 1882 Manchester, England, UK |
| Died | 21 January 1946 (aged 63) Pasadena, California, U.S. |
| Citizenship | American and British |
| Fields | Geometry, Partial differential equations |
| Doctoral advisor | Frank Morley |
| Doctoral students | Clifford Truesdell |
| Known for |
Bateman Manuscript Project Bateman function Bateman polynomials Bateman transform |
| Notable awards |
Senior Wrangler (1903) Smith's Prize (1905) |
Harry Bateman FRS (29 May 1882 – 21 January 1946) was an English mathematician.
Harry Bateman first grew to love mathematics at Manchester Grammar School, and in his final year, won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. Bateman studied with coach Robert Alfred Herman preparing for Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. He distinguished himself in 1903 as Senior Wrangler (tied with P.E. Marrack) and by winning the Smith's Prize (1905). He studied in Göttingen and Paris, taught at the University of Liverpool and University of Manchester before moving to the US in 1910. First he taught at Bryn Mawr College and then Johns Hopkins University. There, working with Frank Morley in geometry, he achieved the PhD. In 1917 he took up his permanent position at California Institute of Technology, then still called Throop Polytechnic Institute.
Eric Temple Bell says, "Like his contemporaries and immediate predecessors among Cambridge mathematicians of the first decade of this century [1901–1910]... Bateman was thoroughly trained in both pure analysis and mathematical physics, and retained an equal interest in both throughout his scientific career."Theodore von Kármán was called in as an advisor for a projected aeronautics laboratory at Caltech and later gave this appraisal of Bateman.
In 1907 Harry Bateman was lecturing at the University of Liverpool together with another senior wrangler, Ebenezer Cunningham. Together they came up with the idea of a conformal group of spacetime which involved an extension of the method of images. For his part, in 1910 Bateman published "The transformation of the electrodynamical equations". 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 Poincaré group and the Lorentz group. Bateman called the elements of this group spherical wave transformations.
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