Ebenezer Cunningham (7 May 1881 in Hackney,

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

– 12 February 1977) was a British

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

who is remembered for his research and exposition at the dawn of

special relativity In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory regarding the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein's original treatment, the theory is based on two postulates: # The laws o ...

Biography

Cunningham went up to

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corpo ...

in 1899 and graduated

Senior Wrangler The Senior Frog Wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge in England, a position which has been described as "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain." Specifically, it is the person who a ...

in 1902, winning the

Smith's Prize The Smith's Prize was the name of each of two prizes awarded annually to two research students in mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1769. Following the reorganization in 1998, they are now awarded under the n ...

in 1904. In 1904, as a lecturer at the

University of Liverpool , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

, he began work on a new theorem in relativity with fellow lecturer

Harry Bateman 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 Poincare ...

. They brought the methods of

inversive geometry Inversive activities are processes which self internalise the action concerned. For example, a person who has an Inversive personality internalises his emotions from any exterior source. An inversive heat source would be a heat source where all th ...

into electromagnetic theory with their transformations (

spherical wave transformation Spherical wave transformations leave the form of spherical waves as well as the laws of optics and electrodynamics invariant in all inertial frames. They were defined between 1908 and 1909 by Harry Bateman and Ebenezer Cunningham, with Bateman givi ...

): :Each four-dimensional solution o Maxwell's equationscould then be inverted in a four-dimensional ''hypersphere of pseudo-radius K'' in order to produce a new solution. Central to Cunningham's paper was the demonstration that Maxwell's equations retained their form under these transformations. He worked with

Karl Pearson Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university st ...

in 1907 at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

. Cunningham married Ada Collins in 1908. In August 1911 he returned to St John's College where he made his career. When drafted for the war in 1915 he did alternative service growing food and in an office at the YMCA. He held a university lectureship from 1926 to 1946. His book ''The Principle of Relativity'' (1914) was one of the first treatises in English about special relativity, along with those by

Alfred Robb Alfred Arthur Robb FRS (18 January 1873 in Belfast – 14 December 1936 in Castlereagh) was a Northern Irish physicist. Biography Robb studied at Queen's College, Belfast (BA 1894) and at St John's College, Cambridge (Tripos 1897, MA 1901) ...

and

Ludwik Silberstein Ludwik Silberstein (1872 – 1948) was a Polish-American physicist who helped make special relativity and general relativity staples of university coursework. His textbook '' The Theory of Relativity'' was published by Macmillan in 1914 with a sec ...

. He followed with ''Relativity and the Electron Theory'' (1915) and ''Relativity, Electron Theory and Gravitation'' (1921). McCrea writes that Cunningham had doubts whether general relativity produced "physical results adequate return for mathematical elaboration." He was an ardent pacifist, strongly religious, a member of

Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge Downing Place United Reformed Church, Cambridge is a church in Cambridge, United Kingdom, that is part of the United Reformed Church. It was formed in 2018 in a merger between St Columba's Church, Cambridge, and Emmanuel Church, Cambridge. The ...

and chairman of the

Congregational Union of England and Wales The Congregational Union of England and Wales brought together churches in England and Wales in the Congregational tradition between 1831 and 1966. The Congregational churches emerged from the Puritan movement, each church operating independently ...

for 1953–54.

Works

* 1914
''The Principle of Relativity''
from

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

Notes

References

* William McCrea (1978), "Ebenezer Cunningham", ''

Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical ...

'' 10: 116–12
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* Andrew Warwick (2003), ''Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics'',

University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including ''The Chicago Manual of Style'', ...

, pp. 409–36.

External links

Oral history interview transcript with Ebenezer Cunningham on 19 June 1963, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cunningham, Ebenezer 1881 births 1977 deaths Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge 20th-century British mathematicians People educated at Dame Alice Owen's School British relativity theorists Senior Wranglers

Biography

Works

See also

Notes

References

External links