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MacTutor (St Andrews): biography and the London Mathematical Society obituary

Visit: 2026-10-07, Investigator run (STEP I). Site: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk Pages: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Whittaker/ (read in Chrome); https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/LMS/whittaker_lms_obit.pdf (Chrome could not read the PDF; read through the web-fetch tool's local copy with pdftotext. Not copied into research/files/; downloading needs the owner's approval).

MacTutor biography (O'Connor and Robertson, last update October 2003) [web]

  • Born Southport 24 Oct 1873, died Edinburgh 24 Mar 1956. Trinity College, Cambridge from 1892; Second Wrangler 1895; Fellow 1896. Pupils included Hardy, Jeans, Bateman, Eddington, Littlewood, Turnbull and Watson.
  • Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society 1901-1906 (elsewhere on the page, 1901-1907). So he was the RAS secretary when his 1902 MNRAS gravity note appeared and when Stoney's 1903 critique was read at the RAS.
  • Royal Astronomer of Ireland (Dunsink) 1906; Edinburgh chair from 1912.
  • Quote: "His results in partial differential equations (described as 'most sensational' by Watson) included a general solution of the Laplace equation in three dimensions ... and the solution of the wave equation."
  • "He also worked on electromagnetic theory giving a general solution of Maxwell's equation, and it was through this topic that his interest in relativity arose."
  • Received into the Roman Catholic Church 1930; Pontifical Academy of Sciences 1936; Copley Medal 1954.

W. H. McCrea, "Edmund Taylor Whittaker", J. London Math. Soc. 32 (1957) 234-256 (doi 10.1112/jlms/s1-32.2.234) [web: PDF text]

  • pp. ~240: "Whittaker pointed out that the solution of Laplace's equation shows how a static gravitational field can be regarded as resulting from effects that are being propagated through the field. In this way he anticipated some features of general relativity and of his own later interest in that theory. It is interesting to know that Whittaker's purely mathematical discovery attracted attention in the daily press of the time."
  • On the relativity papers: he extended Hilbert's variational derivation of Einstein's field equations to include electromagnetism, and "anticipated in principle some of the much later work of Einstein and others"; he extended the vector potential of a moving electron to general relativity. On unified field theories he "had no easy optimism about their physical significance."
  • Bibliography (useful list of own works on the subject): no. 8, 1902, MNRAS 62, 617-620; no. 10, 1903, Math. Ann. 57, 333-355; no. 43, 1927, "On Hilbert's world-function", Proc. R. Soc. A 113; no. 44, 1927, "On electric phenomena in a gravitational field", Proc. R. Soc. A 116, 720-735; 1928, "Note on the law that light-rays are the null geodesics of a gravitational field", Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 24, 32-34; 1928, "The influence of gravitation on electromagnetic phenomena", J. London Math. Soc. 3, 137-144; 1928, "On the potential of electromagnetic phenomena in a gravitational field", Proc. R. Soc. A 120, 1-13; 1935, "Relativity, gravitation and world-structure", Observatory 58, 179-188; 1937, "The relativity theory of protons and electrons", Observatory 60, 14-23; 1943, "The aether: past and present", Endeavour 2, 117-120; 1944, "Old and new ideas of gravitation", Endeavour 3, 39-42.

Bearing

  • Priority 1: the bibliography is the checklist of Whittaker's own gravity writings, from the 1902 note to the 1944 Endeavour article.
  • Priority 4: "attracted attention in the daily press of the time" points to 1902-03 newspaper coverage of the undulatory-gravity idea. This record has not been searched yet. Next targets: British Newspaper Archive, The Times Digital Archive, Chronicling America and Trove, for "Whittaker" plus "gravitation" in 1902-1903.
  • McCrea, a cosmologist and Whittaker's former colleague, reads the 1902-03 result as an anticipation of general relativity's propagated gravity, not as an aether mechanism. That is a sympathetic contemporary reading, worth setting beside Stoney's 1903 critique.