Harry Bateman

Harry Bateman FRS (29 May 1882 – 21 January 1946) was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics. With Ebenezer Cunningham, he expanded the views of spacetime symmetry of Lorentz and Poincare to a more expansive conformal group of spacetime leaving Maxwell's equations invariant. Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology. There he taught fluid dynamics to students going into aerodynamics with Theodore von Karman. Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in his Gibbs Lecture in 1943 titled, "The control of an elastic fluid". Bateman was born in Manchester, England, on 29 May 1882. He first gained an interest in mathematics during his time at Manchester Grammar School. In his final year, he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. Bateman studied with coach Robert Alfred Herman to prepare for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. He distinguished himself in 1903 as Senior Wrangler (tied with P.E. Marrack) and by winning the Smith's Prize (1905). His first paper, "The determination of curves satisfying given conditions", was published when he was still an undergraduate student. He studied in Göttingen and Paris, and taught at the University of Liverpool and University of Manchester. After moving to the US in 1910, he taught at Bryn Mawr College and then Johns Hopkins University. There, working with Frank Morley in geometry, he achieved his Ph.D., prior to which he had already published more than 60 papers, including some of his celebrated papers. In 1917, he took up his permanent position at the California Institute of Technology, which was then known as the "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.

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Related concepts (3)

History of special relativity

The history of special relativity consists of many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. It culminated in the theory of special relativity proposed by Albert Einstein and subsequent work of Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others. Although Isaac Newton based his physics on absolute time and space, he also adhered to the principle of relativity of Galileo Galilei restating it precisely for mechanical systems.

Harry Bateman

Spacetime

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Spacetime diagrams are useful in visualizing and understanding relativistic effects such as how different observers perceive where and when events occur. Until the turn of the 20th century, the assumption had been that the three-dimensional geometry of the universe (its description in terms of locations, shapes, distances, and directions) was distinct from time (the measurement of when events occur within the universe).