E. T. Whittaker - Biography

Biography

Whittaker was born in Southport, in Lancashire. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge from 1892. He graduated as Second Wrangler in the examination in 1895 and also received the Tyson Medal for Mathematics and Astronomy. In 1896, Whittaker was elected as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained at Cambridge as a teacher until 1906. Between 1906 and 1911 he was the Royal Astronomer of Ireland and professor of astronomy at Trinity College Dublin where he taught mathematical physics. In 1911 Whittaker became professor at Edinburgh University and remained there for the rest of his career.

Whittaker was a Christian and became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church (1930). In relation to that he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1936 onward and was president of a Newman Society. Earlier at Cambridge in 1901 he married the daughter of a learned Presbyterian minister. They had five children, including the mathematician John Macnaghten Whittaker, (1905-1984) and his elder daughter, Beatrice, married the man later to become Professor of Maths at St. Andrew's University, ET Copson.

Whittaker wrote the biography of a famous Italian mathematician, Vito Volterra for Royal Society in 1941.

Whittaker was, in 1954, selected by the Fellows of the Royal Society to receive the Copley Medal, the highest award granted by the scientific Royal Society of London, "for his distinguished contributions to both pure and applied mathematics and to theoretical physics". Back in 1931 Whittaker had received the Royal Society's Sylvester Medal "for his original contributions to both pure and applied mathematics". Whittaker died in Edinburgh, Scotland.