Eric Temple Bell
Eric Temple Bell (
1883 -
1960) was a mathematician born in
Scotland who lived in the
USA from
1903 until his death. He attended
Stanford University and
Columbia University 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. 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 numbers of
combinatorics. (He is
not the eponym of the "
Bell curve", which apparently is so called because of its similarity in shape to a cross section of a bell.)
He wrote a book of biographical sketches titled Men of Mathematics, which is still in print.
He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym John Taine.
External link
Eric Temple Bell