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 Graph Search.
Concept
Eric Temple Bell
Summary
Eric Temple Bell (7 February 1883 – 21 December 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.
Eric Temple Bell was born in Peterhead, Aberdeen, Scotland as third of three children to Helen Jane Lyall and James Bell Jr. His father, a factor, relocated to San Jose, California, in 1884, when Eric was fifteen months old. After his father died on 4 January 1896, the family returned to Bedford, England.
Bell was educated at Bedford Modern School, where his teacher Edward Mann Langley inspired him to continue the study of mathematics. Bell returned to the United States, by way of Montreal, in 1902. He received degrees from Stanford University (1904), the University of Washington (1908), and Columbia University (1912) (where he was a student of Cassius Jackson Keyser).
Bell was part of the faculty first at the University of Washington and later at the California Institute of Technology. While at the University of Washington, he taught Howard P. Robertson and encouraged him to enroll at Cal Tech for his doctoral studies.
Bell 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.
In 1924 Bell was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis. In 1927, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1937. He died in 1960 in Watsonville, California.
During the early 1920s, Bell wrote several long poems. He also wrote several science fiction novels, which independently invented some of the earliest devices and ideas of science fiction.
Official source
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.