Eric Temple Bell


Eric Temple Bell 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 Peterhead, 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 4 January, 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. 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 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. 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 serialised in magazines. Basil Davenport, writing in The New York Times, described Taine as "one of the first real scientists to write science-fiction did much to bring it out of the interplanetary cops-and-robbers stage." But he concluded that " 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, which is still in print. The book inspired notable mathematicians including Julia Robinson, John Forbes Nash, Jr., and Andrew Wiles to begin a career in mathematics. 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: " Bell's account , 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 his biographer Constance Reid finds it has fewer weaknesses. His book on Fermat's Last Theorem, The Last Problem, was published the year after his death and is a hybrid of social history and the history of mathematics.

Works

Non-fiction books