H. F. Baker | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

Henry Frederick Baker FRS FRSE (3 July 1866 – 17 March 1956) was a British mathematician, working mainly in algebraic geometry, but also remembered for contributions to partial differential equations (related to what would become known as solitons), and Lie groups. He was born in Cambridge the son of Henry Baker, a butler, and Sarah Ann Britham. He was educated at The Perse School before winning a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge in October 1884. Baker graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1887, bracketed with 3 others. Baker was elected Fellow of St John's in 1888 where he remained for 68 years. In June, 1898 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1911, he gave the presidential address to the London Mathematical Society. Baker was one of the mathematicians (along with E. W. Hobson) to whom Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote before G. H. Hardy but his papers were returned without comment. In January 1914 he was appointed Lowndean Professor of Astronomy. Gordon Welchman recalled that in the 1930s before the war Dennis Babbage and he were members of a group of geometers known as Professor Baker's "Tea Party", who met once a week to discuss the areas of research in which we were all interested. He married twice. Firstly in 1893 to Lilly Isabella Hamfield Klopp, who died in 1903, then he remarried in 1913, to Muriel Irene Woodyard. He died in Cambridge and is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground, with his second wife Muriel (1885 - 1956).

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (3)

Geometry

Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer. Until the 19th century, geometry was almost exclusively devoted to Euclidean geometry, which includes the notions of point, line, plane, distance, angle, surface, and curve, as fundamental concepts.

W. V. D. Hodge

Sir William Vallance Douglas Hodge (hɒdʒ; 17 June 1903 – 7 July 1975) was a British mathematician, specifically a geometer. His discovery of far-reaching topological relations between algebraic geometry and differential geometry—an area now called Hodge theory and pertaining more generally to Kähler manifolds—has been a major influence on subsequent work in geometry.

Italian school of algebraic geometry

In relation to the history of mathematics, the Italian school of algebraic geometry refers to mathematicians and their work in birational geometry, particularly on algebraic surfaces, centered around Rome roughly from 1885 to 1935. There were 30 to 40 leading mathematicians who made major contributions, about half of those being Italian. The leadership fell to the group in Rome of Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi, who were involved in some of the deepest discoveries, as well as setting the style.