RAYLEIGH, John William Strutt, Baron.
Two autograph letters, signed, to the mathematician Thomas Bromwich.
Terling Place, Witham, Essex, 19 June 1916, and 4 Carlton Gardens, Pall Mall, London, 7 March 1917.
8vo bifolia (180 x 113 mm and 178 x 114mm respectively), pp. [5]; sometime folded, some light soiling, in very good condition.
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Two autograph letters, signed, to the mathematician Thomas Bromwich.
In the first, brief, letter, written from Rayleigh’s home at Witham in Essex and dated 19 June 1916, Rayleigh agrees to forward a paper to the Royal Society: ‘I will gladly communicate Mr White’s paper to R. S. The extension of what I did is interesting, and he points out a stupid mistake of mine w[hic]h might easily have led me into more trouble than it did’. ‘Mr White’ is perhaps the American mathematician Henry Seely White (1861–1943).
The second letter, dated 7 March 1917, is written on paper headed ‘4, Carlton Gardens, Pall Mall, S.W.’, the home of Rayleigh’s brother-in-law (and former prime minister) Arthur Balfour. Rayleigh thanks Bromwich for his ‘reprint’ (probably an offprint of a paper), writing: ‘On a short perusal I can see that it contains much that I ought to know, but to appreciate it properly will deprive more time than I have to dispose of at present. I am particularly glad to notice your appreciation of Heaviside, to whom I hope you will send a copy. When I was Sec. R. S. one of his papers was passed over for publication on the concordant reports of two mathematicians & it has always been upon my mind that the decision was probably wrong’.
Rayleigh is here referring to the physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925), whose ‘operational calculus’ for solving differential equations ‘attracted a following among physicists and engineers, but pure mathematicians criticized the method as unrigorous and blocked the Royal Society from publishing one of his papers on the subject in 1894. Incensed, Heaviside launched caustic attacks on “mathematicians of the Cambridge or conservatory kind, who look the gift-horse in the mouth and shake their heads with solemn smile” ’ (ODNB).
The mathematician Thomas John I’Anson Bromwich (1875–1929) was a vice president of the Royal Society in 1919 and 1920. It was Bromwich who, in a series of papers beginning in 1916, indicated how Heaviside’s calculus could be developed in a manner acceptable to pure mathematicians by treating his operators as contour integrals. It is to one of these papers that Rayleigh’s second letter undoubtedly refers.
