John Taine

Bell was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, but his father, a factor, relocated to San Jose, California during 1884, when he was fifteen months old. The family returned to Bedford, England after his father's death, on January 4, 1896. Bell returned to the United States by way of Montreal during 1902. Bell was educated at Bedford Modern School, where his teacher Edward Mann Langley inspired him to continue the study of mathematics, Stanford University, the University of Washington, and Columbia University (where he was a student of Cassius Jackson Keyser). He was part of the faculty first at the University of Washington and later at the California Institute of Technology. He researched number theory; see in particular Bell series. He attempted--- not altogether successfully--- to make the traditional umbral calculus (understood at that time to be the same thing as the "symbolic method" of Blissard) rigorous logically. He also did much work using generating functions, treated as formal power series, without concern for convergence. He is the eponym of the Bell polynomials and the Bell numbers of combinatorics (but not the "bell curve"). During 1924 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis. He died during 1960 in Watsonville, California.