Edmund Taylor Whittaker
August 2026
Portrait: Arthur Trevor Haddon, 1933, National Portrait Gallery London (NPG 4299), via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.
Who he was
Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker (1873–1956) was an English mathematician, theoretical physicist, astronomer, and historian of science. Cambridge-trained (Second Wrangler, 1895; Trinity Fellow, 1896), he became Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Dublin in 1906 and Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh from 1912 to 1946, where in 1913 he opened what is generally called Britain’s first university mathematical laboratory. Elected FRS in 1905. Lecturing at Cambridge from 1896 to 1906, he rebuilt the syllabus around complex analysis and special functions for pupils including G. H. Hardy, J. E. Littlewood, A. S. Eddington, and G. N. Watson; those lectures became his textbook A Course of Modern Analysis (1902), still printed today in its 1915 edition with Watson as “Whittaker and Watson.”
What he’s known for on this site
Whittaker’s 1910 book A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity is the standard scholarly account of how physics’s aether concept evolved from Descartes through Faraday, Maxwell, and Lorentz to its abandonment after the Michelson-Morley null result — the same arc this site’s own Aether topic page and Disproven Theories catalog page summarize. He also produced the Whittaker–Shannon interpolation formula (rebuilding a band-limited signal from evenly spaced samples, the same family as the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem) and, in 1904, showed the electromagnetic field of a moving charge could be written from two ordinary scalar functions instead of the usual scalar-plus-vector-potential pair. Mainstream physics treats that 1904 result as an elegant mathematical identity; the source post notes later readers have linked it to waves and lensing outside that mainstream reading, which this site does not endorse or repeat as a claim of its own.
Catalog status: Proven Systems
Whittaker’s mathematics — the interpolation formula and the 1904 field identity as mainstream physics states it — is established, uncontested work. So is the 1910 first volume of his aether history, the pre-Einstein classical-aether account this site actually cites. His 1953 second volume is a separate matter, not cited here: it’s noted among historians of science for crediting special relativity to “the Relativity Theory of Poincaré and Lorentz” over Einstein, a treatment even Max Born tried to talk him out of. The fringe re-readings of the 1904 paper mentioned above are likewise not Whittaker’s own claim and aren’t what’s being cited here.
Mentioned on this site
- Aether — the same historical arc his 1910 history book documents
- Michelson & Morley — the null result his history book covers as its own turning point
- Disproven Theories — why the classical, fixed aether Whittaker wrote the history of is dead
Where this touches PBT
PBT’s own aether field is a deliberate departure from the classical, fixed aether Whittaker’s history book documents — see Michelson & Morley for why that null result doesn’t automatically refute PBT’s dynamical version. Whittaker is included here for the real historical scholarship behind that story and as a working mathematician whose name attaches to real, still-used results — not because any of his own mathematics has been adopted into PBT’s papers.