Harry Bateman

Harry Bateman
1931 drawing of Harry Bateman
Born(1882-05-29)29 May 1882
Manchester, England
Died21 January 1946(1946-01-21) (aged 63)
Milford, Utah, USA
EducationTrinity College, Cambridge (BA, MA)
Johns Hopkins University (PhD)
Known forSpherical wave transformation
Bateman Manuscript Project
Bateman–Burgers equation
Bateman equation
Bateman function
Bateman polynomials
Bateman transform
AwardsSenior Wrangler (1903)
Smith's Prize (1905)
Gibbs Lecture (1943)
Scientific career
FieldsGeometrical optics
Partial differential equations
Fluid dynamics
Electromagnetism
WorkplacesBryn Mawr College
Johns Hopkins University
California Institute of Technology
ThesisThe Quartic Curve and Its Inscribed Configurations (1913)
Frank Morley
Doctoral students
Clifford Truesdell
Howard P. Robertson
Albert George Wilson

Harry Bateman FRS (29 May 1882 – 21 January 1946) was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics. With Ebenezer Cunningham, he expanded the views of spacetime symmetry of Lorentz and Poincaré to a more expansive conformal group of spacetime leaving Maxwell's equations invariant. Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology. There he taught fluid dynamics to students going into aerodynamics with Theodore von Karman. Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in his Gibbs Lecture in 1943 titled, "The control of an elastic fluid".