Frank Smithies

Frank Smithies (1912 to 2002) was a British mathematician who worked on integral equations, functional analysis and the history of mathematics. He was born in Edinburgh, studied at the University of Edinburgh and then at St John's College, Cambridge, where he began research on integral equations under the influence of G. H. Hardy. His text on integral equations, published by Cambridge University Press in 1958, was written as a successor to Maxime Bocher's earlier tract on the subject. Although he published little original research in functional analysis after 1940, he shaped the subject in Britain through his teaching and the research students he guided at Cambridge. After retiring in 1979 he turned seriously to the history of mathematics and published studies of Weierstrass's construction of the real numbers, Cauchy's conception of rigour and Cauchy's creation of complex function theory. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1961.