• DOI:10.1098/rsbm.1956.0021
• Corpus ID: 121968984

Edmund Taylor Whittaker, 1873-1956

@article{Temple1956EdmundTW,
  title={Edmund Taylor Whittaker, 1873-1956},
  author={George Frederick James Temple},
  journal={Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society},
  year={1956},
  pages={299 - 325}
}

• G. Temple
• Published 1 November 1956
• Mathematics
• Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society

Edmund Taylor Whittaker was born on 24 October 1873, the eldest child of John Whittaker and his wife Selina, daughter of Edmund Taylor, M.D. The family belonged to the district where the river Ribble forms the boundary between Lancashire and Yorkshire: his father, John Whittaker (1820-1910) was the youngest son of the first marriage of Henry Whittaker (1780-1853) of Grindleton near Clitheroe, who was the sixth of the eight sons of Richard Whittaker of Rodhill Gate near Grindleton. Several of Richard’s descendants were men of distinction in the late Victorian period, among them the Right Hon. Sir Thomas Palmer Whittaker (1850-1919), for many years M.P. for the Spen Valley division of Yorkshire, and Sir Meredith T. Whittaker (1841-1931), of Scarborough. His father on his marriage to his mother—whose father practised as a physician at Middleton near Manchester—settled in Southport. Though not well off, they were able to live on their private means: and there Whittaker was born. In childhood he was extremely delicate, and his time was spent almost entirely with his mother, who devoted herself to him and was in his earlier years his only teacher. As he grew older he grew stronger, and at the age of eleven was sent away from home to the Manchester Grammar School, which then dominated education in Lancashire. He was on the classical side, which meant that three-fifths of his time was devoted to Latin and Greek: in the lower forms, where the study was purely linguistic, he did well: but his lack of interest in poetry and drama caused a falling-off when he was promoted to the upper school, and he was glad to escape by electing to specialize in mathematics. Only after he had left school did he discover the field of Latin and Greek learning that really appealed to him—ancient and mediaeval theology, philosophy and science.