Eric Temple Bell

For other people named Eric Bell, see Eric Bell (disambiguation).

Eric Temple Bell
Bell as pictured in Wonder Stories in 1931
Born	(1883-02-07)February 7, 1883 Peterhead, Scotland, UK
Died	Watsonville, California, USA
Residence	United States
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Washington California Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Stanford University Columbia University (Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisor	Frank Nelson Cole Cassius Keyser
Doctoral students	Howard Percy Robertson Morgan Ward Zhou Peiyuan
Known for	Number theory Bell series Bell polynomials Bell numbers Bell triangle Ordered Bell numbers
Notable awards	Bôcher Memorial Prize (1924)

Eric Temple Bell (February 7, 1883 – December 21, 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.

Biography

Bell was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, but his father, a factor, relocated 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 was educated at Bedford Modern School, where his teacher Edward Mann Langley inspired him to continue the study of mathematics, Stanford University, the University of Washington, and Columbia University (where he was a student of Cassius Jackson Keyser). He was part of the faculty first at the University of Washington and later at the California Institute of Technology.

He 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 (but not the "bell curve"). In 1924 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis. He died in 1960 in Watsonville, California.

Fiction and poetry

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. Only the novel The Purple Sapphire was published at the time, using 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 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." But he concluded that "[Taine] is sadly lacking as a novelist, in style and especially in characterization."

Writing about mathematics

Bell wrote a book of biographical essays 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 inspired notable mathematicians including Julia Robinson, John Forbes Nash, Jr., and Andrew Wiles to begin a career as a mathematician. However, historians of mathematics have disputed the accuracy of much of Bell's history. In fact, Bell does not distinguish carefully between anecdote and history. He has been much criticized for romanticizing Évariste Galois. For example: "[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 Cantor's relationships with his father and with Leopold Kronecker to stereotypes, has been criticized even more severely.

Bell's later book, Development of Mathematics has been less famous, but Constance Reid finds it has fewer weaknesses. The Last Problem is a hybrid, between a social history and a history of mathematics.

Works

Non-fiction books

• An Arithmetical Theory of Certain Numerical Functions, Seattle Washington, The University, 1915, 50p. PDF/DjVu copy from 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.
• Numerology, Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Co., 1933, 187p. LCCN 33-6808
  • Reprint: Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979, ISBN 0-88355-774-6, 187p. – "Reprint of the ed. published by Century Co., New York" LCCN 78-13855
• 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 Mathematics, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1937, 592p.
  • Reprint: Touchstone (Simon & Schuster paperback), 1986. ISBN 0671628186 LCCN 86-10229
• The Development of Mathematics, New York, McGraw–Hill, 1940, 637p.
  • Second Edition: New York, McGraw–Hill, 1945, 637p.
  • Reprint: Dover Publications, 1992
• The Magic of Numbers, Whittlesey House, 1946, 418p.
  • Reprint: New York, Dover Publications, 1991, ISBN 0-486-26788-1, 418p.
  • Reprint: Sacred Science Institute, 2006
• Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science, McGraw-Hill, 1951, 437p.
• The Last Problem, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, 308p.
  • Reprint: Mathematical Association of America, 1990, ISBN 0-88385-451-1, 326p.

Scholarly papers

• "Arithmetical paraphrases". In: Transactions of the AMS 22, 1921, p. 1–30 and 198–219
• "Arithmetical equivalents for a remarkable identity between theta functions". In: Mathematische Zeitschrift 13, 1922, p. 146–152
• "Existence theorems on the numbers of representations of odd integers as sums of 4 t + 2 squares". In: Crelles Journal 163, 1930, p. 65–70
• "Exponential numbers". In: The American Mathematical Monthly 41, 1934, p. 411–419

Novels

• The Purple Sapphire (1924)
• The Gold Tooth (1927)
• Quayle's Invention (1927)
• Green Fire (1928)
• The Greatest Adventure (1929)
• The Iron Star (1930)
• The Time Stream (1931)
• Seeds of Life (1931)
• Before the Dawn (1934)
• Tomorrow (1939)
• The Forbidden Garden (1947)
• The Cosmic Geoids and One Other (1949)
• The Crystal Horde (1952)
• G.O.G. 666 (1954)

Poetry

• The Singer (1916)

Quotes

• "Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics."

"Time makes fools of us all "

References

Citations

• Reid, Constance (1993). The Search for E. T. Bell, Also Known as John Taine. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America. x + 372 pp. ISBN 0-88385-508-9. OCLC 29190602.
• Rothman, T. (1982). "Genius and biographers: the fictionalization of Evariste Galois". American Mathematics Monthly 89, no. 2, 84–106.

Other sources

External links

• Biographical sketch by Constance Reid
• .
• Eric Temple Bell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• MAA presidents: Eric Temple
• John Taine at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• John Taine at Library of Congress Authorities, with 26 catalog records (distinct from Bell)
• Eric Temple Bell at Library of Congress Authorities, with 26 catalog records (distinct from Taine)
• Author profile in the database zbMATH