Edwin Bidwell Wilson

Edwin Bidwell Wilson (April 25, 1879 – December 28, 1964) was an American mathematician and polymath. He was the sole protégé of Yale's physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs and was mentor to MIT economist Paul Samuelson. He received his AB from Harvard College in 1899 and his PhD from Yale University in 1901, working under Gibbs. E.B. Wilson compiled the textbook Vector Analysis, based on Gibbs' lectures, as Gibbs was at the time busy preparing his book on thermodynamics. In 1904 Wilson reviewed Bertrand Russell's text on foundations of mathematics called The Principles of Mathematics. He wrote "The Space-Time Manifold of Relativity" with Gilbert N. Lewis in 1912. Wilson went on to write two more textbooks: Advanced Calculus (1912) and...