Eric Temple Bell
Encyclopedia
Eric Temple Bell was a mathematician
and science fiction author born in Scotland
who lived in the U.S.
for most of his life. He published his non-fiction under his given name and his fiction as John Taine.
, Scotland
, but his father, a fish-factor
, moved 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 attended Stanford University
and Columbia University
(where he was a student of Cassius Jackson Keyser
) and was on the faculty first at the University of Washington
and later at the California Institute of Technology
.
He did research in 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 function
s, 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 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize
for his work in mathematical analysis
. He died in Watsonville, California
.
novels, which independently invented some of the earliest devices and ideas of science fiction. Only The Purple Sapphire was published at the time, under the pseudonym
John Taine; this was before Hugo Gernsback
and the genre publication of science fiction. His novels were published later, both in book form and serialized in the magazines. Basil Davenport, writing in The New York Times
, described "Taine" as "one of the first real scientists to write science-fiction [who] did much to bring it out of the interplanetary cops-and-robbers stage." Davenport concluded, however, that "[Taine] is sadly lacking as a novelist, in style and especially in characterization."
Bell wrote a book of biographical sketches titled Men of Mathematics
, (one chapter of which was the first popular account of the 19th century woman mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya
) and which is still in print. The book is alleged to have inspired some people to take up mathematics. Historians of mathematics have disputed the accuracy of much of Bell's history. In fact, through most of the text, Bell does not distinguish carefully between anecdote and history. He has been much criticised for romanticizing Évariste Galois
. Rothman (1982, p. 103) writes: "[E. T.] Bell's account [of Galois's life], by far the most famous, is also the most fictitious."
His treatment of Georg Cantor
, which reduced his relationships with his father and with Leopold Kronecker
to stereotypes, has been even more severely criticized.
Bell's later book, Development of Mathematics has been less famous, but Constance Reid finds it has many fewer weaknesses. The Last Problem is a hybrid, between a social history and a history of mathematics.
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
and science fiction author born in Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
who lived in the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
for most of his life. He published his non-fiction under his given name and his fiction as John Taine.
Biography
He was born in PeterheadPeterhead
Peterhead is a town in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. It is Aberdeenshire's biggest settlement , with a population of 17,947 at the 2001 Census and estimated to have fallen to 17,330 by 2006....
, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, but his father, a fish-factor
Factor (Scotland)
In Scotland a factor is a person or firm charged with superintending or managing properties and estates -- sometimes where the owner or landlord is unable to or uninterested in attending to such details personally, or in tenements in which several owners of individual flats contribute to the...
, moved to San Jose, California
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
in 1884, when he was fifteen months old. The family returned to Bedford
Bedford
Bedford is the county town of Bedfordshire, in the East of England. It is a large town and the administrative centre for the wider Borough of Bedford. According to the former Bedfordshire County Council's estimates, the town had a population of 79,190 in mid 2005, with 19,720 in the adjacent town...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
after his father's death, on January 4, 1896. Bell returned to the United States, by way of Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
in 1902.
Bell attended Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
(where he was a student of Cassius Jackson Keyser
Cassius Jackson Keyser
Cassius Jackson Keyser was an American mathematician of pronounced philosophical inclinations.-Life:...
) and was on the faculty first at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
and later at the California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
.
He did research in number theory
Number theory
Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers. Number theorists study prime numbers as well...
; see in particular Bell series
Bell series
In mathematics, the Bell series is a formal power series used to study properties of arithmetical functions. Bell series were introduced and developed by Eric Temple Bell....
. He attempted—not altogether successfully—to make the traditional umbral calculus
Umbral calculus
In mathematics before the 1970s, the term umbral calculus referred to the surprising similarity between seemingly unrelated polynomial equations and certain shadowy techniques used to 'prove' them. These techniques were introduced by and are sometimes called Blissard's symbolic method...
(understood at that time to be the same thing as the "symbolic method" of Blissard) logically rigorous. He also did much work using generating function
Generating function
In mathematics, a generating function is a formal power series in one indeterminate, whose coefficients encode information about a sequence of numbers an that is indexed by the natural numbers. Generating functions were first introduced by Abraham de Moivre in 1730, in order to solve the general...
s, treated as formal power series, without concern for convergence
Limit of a sequence
The limit of a sequence is, intuitively, the unique number or point L such that the terms of the sequence become arbitrarily close to L for "large" values of n...
. He is the eponym of the Bell polynomials and the Bell numbers of combinatorics
Combinatorics
Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics concerning the study of finite or countable discrete structures. Aspects of combinatorics include counting the structures of a given kind and size , deciding when certain criteria can be met, and constructing and analyzing objects meeting the criteria ,...
. In 1924 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize
Bôcher Memorial Prize
The Bôcher Memorial Prize was founded by the American Mathematical Society in 1923 in memory of Maxime Bôcher with an initial endowment of $1,450 . It is awarded every five years for a notable research memoir in analysis that has appeared during the past six years in a recognized North American...
for his work in mathematical analysis
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical analysis, which mathematicians refer to simply as analysis, has its beginnings in the rigorous formulation of infinitesimal calculus. It is a branch of pure mathematics that includes the theories of differentiation, integration and measure, limits, infinite series, and analytic functions...
. He died in Watsonville, California
Watsonville, California
Watsonville is a city in Santa Cruz County, California, United States. The population was 51,199 according to the 2010 census.Located on the central coast of California, the economy centers predominantly around the farming industry. It is known for growing strawberries, apples, lettuce and a host...
.
Fiction and poetry
In the early 1920s, Bell wrote several long poems. He also wrote several science fictionScience fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novels, which independently invented some of the earliest devices and ideas of science fiction. Only The Purple Sapphire was published at the time, under the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
John Taine; this was before Hugo Gernsback
Hugo Gernsback
Hugo Gernsback , born Hugo Gernsbacher, was a Luxembourgian American inventor, writer, editor, and magazine publisher, best remembered for publications that included the first science fiction magazine. His contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with H. G...
and the genre publication of science fiction. His novels were published later, both in book form and serialized in the magazines. Basil Davenport, writing in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, described "Taine" as "one of the first real scientists to write science-fiction [who] did much to bring it out of the interplanetary cops-and-robbers stage." Davenport concluded, however, that "[Taine] is sadly lacking as a novelist, in style and especially in characterization."
Criticism of Bell's writing about mathematics
Men of Mathematics
Men of Mathematics is a book on the history of mathematics written in 1937 by the mathematician E.T. Bell. After a brief chapter on three ancient mathematicians, the remainder of the book is devoted to the lives of about forty mathematicians who worked in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth...
, (one chapter of which was the first popular account of the 19th century woman mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya
Sofia Kovalevskaya
Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya , was the first major Russian female mathematician, responsible for important original contributions to analysis, differential equations and mechanics, and the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe.She was also one of the first females to...
) and which is still in print. The book is alleged to have inspired some people to take up mathematics. Historians of mathematics have disputed the accuracy of much of Bell's history. In fact, through most of the text, Bell does not distinguish carefully between anecdote and history. He has been much criticised for romanticizing Évariste Galois
Évariste Galois
Évariste Galois was a French mathematician born in Bourg-la-Reine. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a long-standing problem...
. Rothman (1982, p. 103) writes: "[E. T.] Bell's account [of Galois's life], by far the most famous, is also the most fictitious."
His treatment of Georg Cantor
Georg Cantor
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was a German mathematician, best known as the inventor of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets,...
, which reduced his relationships with his father and with Leopold Kronecker
Leopold Kronecker
Leopold Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory and algebra.He criticized Cantor's work on set theory, and was quoted by as having said, "God made integers; all else is the work of man"...
to stereotypes, has been even more severely criticized.
Bell's later book, Development of Mathematics has been less famous, but Constance Reid finds it has many fewer weaknesses. The Last Problem is a hybrid, between a social history and a history of mathematics.
Non-fiction books
- An Arithmetical Theory of Certain Numerical Functions, Seattle Washington, The University, 1915, 50p. PDF/DjVu copy from Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
. - The Cyclotomic Quinary Quintic, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, The New Era Printing Company, 1912, 97p.
- Algebraic Arithmetic, New York, American Mathematical Society, 1927, 180p.
- Debunking Science, Seattle, University of Washington book store, 1930, 40p.
- The Queen of the Sciences, Stechert, 1931, 138p.
- The Search for Truth, Baltimore, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934, 279p.
- Reprint: Williams and Wilkins Co, 1935
- The Handmaiden of the Sciences, Williams & Wilkins, 1937, 216p.
- Man and His Lifebelts, New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1938, 340p.
- Reprint: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1935, 2nd printing 1946
- Reprint: Kessinger Publishing, 2005
- Men of MathematicsMen of MathematicsMen of Mathematics is a book on the history of mathematics written in 1937 by the mathematician E.T. Bell. After a brief chapter on three ancient mathematicians, the remainder of the book is devoted to the lives of about forty mathematicians who worked in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth...
, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1937, 592p. - The Development of Mathematics, New York, McGraw–Hill, 1945, 637p.
- Reprint: New York, McGraw–Hill, 1945
- Reprint: Dover Publications, 1992
- The Magic of Numbers, Whittlesey House, 1946, 418p.
- Reprint: New York, Dover PublicationsDover PublicationsDover Publications is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward Cirker and his wife, Blanche. It publishes primarily reissues, books no longer published by their original publishers. These are often, but not always, books in the public domain. The original published editions may be...
, 1991, ISBN 0-486-26788-1, 418p. - Reprint: Sacred Science Institute, 2006
- Reprint: New York, Dover Publications
- Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science, McGraw-HillMcGraw-HillThe McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, education, publishing, broadcasting, and business services...
, 1951, 437p. - The Last Problem, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1961, 308p.
- Reprint: Mathematical Association of AmericaMathematical Association of AmericaThe Mathematical Association of America is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians; computer scientists;...
, 1990, ISBN 0-88385-451-1, 326p.
- Reprint: Mathematical Association of America
- Numerology, Hyperion Press, 1979, ISBN 0-88355-774-6, 195p.
Novels
- The Purple Sapphire (1924)
- The Gold Tooth (1927)
- Quayle's Invention (1927)
- Green FireGreen Fire (novel)Green Fire is a science fiction novel by author John Taine . It was first published in 1928 by E. P. Dutton. The novel was adapted and produced as a play.-Plot introduction:...
(1928) - The Greatest Adventure (1929)
- The Iron StarThe Iron StarThe Iron Star is a science fiction novel by author John Taine . It was first published in 1930 by E. P. Dutton.-Plot introduction:...
(1930) - The Time StreamThe Time StreamThe Time Stream is a science fiction novel by author John Taine . The novel was originally serialized in four parts in the magazine Wonder Stories beginning in December 1931. It was first published in book form in 1946 by The Buffalo Book Company in an edition of 2,000 copies of which only 500 were...
(1931) - Seeds of LifeSeeds of LifeSeeds of Life is a science fiction novel by author John Taine . It was first published in 1951 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 2,991 copies...
(1931) - Before the Dawn (1934)
- The Forbidden Garden (1947)
- The Cosmic Geoids and One OtherThe Cosmic Geoids and One OtherThe Cosmic Geoids and One Other is a collection of two science fiction novellas by author John Taine . It was first published in 1949 by Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. in an edition of 1,200 copies...
(1949) - The Crystal HordeThe Crystal HordeThe Crystal Horde is a science fiction novel by author John Taine . It was first published in book form in 1952 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 2,328 copies...
(1952) - G.O.G. 666G.O.G. 666G.O.G. 666 is a science fiction novel by author John Taine . It was first published in 1954 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 1,815 copies.-Plot introduction:...
(1954)
Quotes
- "Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us."http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/etbell201499.html