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Eric Temple Bell (February 7 1883, Peterhead, Scotland - December 21 1960, Watsonville, California) was a mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the USA from 1903 until his death. He published his non-fiction as Bell and his fiction as John Taine.
Biography
He 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 is the eponym of the Bell polynomials and the Bell numbers of combinatorics. (He is not the eponym of the "bell curve", which is so called because of its apparent similarity in shape to the cross-section of a bell.) In 1924 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis.
Writing career
Bell wrote a book of biographical sketches titled Men of Mathematics, which is still in print. It inspired many people to take up mathematics, though historians of mathematics do not regard it as particularly accurate. He wrote numerous science fiction novels under the pseudonym John Taine, which were well received at the time of their publication, but have been largely forgotten now. In 1993 Constance Reid wrote a biography, The Search for E.T. Bell, which portrayed its subject as secretive, eccentric and somewhat mysterious.
Works
Non-fiction books
- An Arithmetical Theory of Certain Numerical Functions, Seattle Washington, The University, 1915, 50p.
- 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 Search for Truth, Baltimore, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934, 279p.
- Reprint: Williams and Wilkins Co, 1935
- 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 Mathematics, 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 Publications, 1991, ISBN 0486267881, 418p.
- Reprint: Sacred Science Institute, 2006
- Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1951)
- The Last Problem, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1961, 308p.
- Reprint: Mathematical Association of America, 1990, ISBN 0883854511, 326p.
- Numerology, Hyperion Press, 1979, ISBN 0883557746, 195p.
Scholarly papers
Novels
- The Purple Sapphire (1924)
- The Gold Tooth (1927)
- Quayle's Invention (1927)
- Green Fire (1928)
- The Greatest Adventure (1929)
- The Crystal Horde (1930)
- The Iron Star (1930)
- The Time Stream (1931)
- Seeds of Life (1931)
- Before the Dawn (1934)
- The Forbidden Garden (1947)
- The Crystal Horde (1952)
- G.O.G. 666 (1954)
References
- Constance Reid. The Search for E.T. Bell, Also Known as John Taine. Washington, DC, Mathematical Association of America, 1993, ISBN 0883855089, x, 372p.
External links
1883 births | 1960 deaths | American mathematicians | Scottish mathematicians | 20th century mathematicians | Combinatorists | Science fiction writers | Scottish writers | Scottish-Americans | Polymaths | Columbia University alumni | Stanford University alumni | Historians of mathematics
"Eric Temple Bell"