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Eric Temple Bell

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Eric Temple Bell was a Scottish-born mathematician best known for his history of mathematics book Men of Mathematics. He was born in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire on 7 February 1883 and died in Watsonville, California on 21 December 1960. The Bell numbers, which count the ways of partitioning a set, are named after him because he wrote about them in the 1930s, following a 1934 paper in which he studied the Bell polynomials, an example of a result carrying a name that is not strictly its first discoverer's.

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Source Wikipedia: Bell number

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Source Eric Temple Bell, Biography (MacTutor History of Mathematics)
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Source Eric Temple Bell, Biography (MacTutor History of Mathematics)Summary
Quote, Summary
Eric Temple Bell was a Scottish-born mathematician best known for his history of mathematics book: Men of Mathematics .
Sources
1. Eric Temple Bell, Biography (MacTutor History of Mathematics)
  • Summary
    Eric Temple Bell was a Scottish-born mathematician best known for his history of mathematics book: Men of Mathematics .
  • In Branch: Number Theory, Biography
    Bell confided in Hotelling that if he had not sunk fifteen years of his life into number theory, he would have loved to undertake research into relativity theory.
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Wikipedia: Bell number
Attributed Works: Bell Numbers, Lead
Quote, Attributed Works: Bell Numbers, Lead
The Bell numbers are named after Eric Temple Bell, who wrote about them in 1938, following up a 1934 paper in which he studied the Bell polynomials
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