Ebenezer Cunningham (7 May 1881 in Hackney, London – 12 February 1977)
was a British mathematician who is remembered for his research and exposition at the dawn of special relativity.
Biography
Cunningham went up to St John's College, Cambridge in 1899 and graduated Senior Wrangler in 1902, winning the Smith's Prize in 1904.
In 1904, as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, he began work on a new theorem in relativity with fellow lecturer Harry Bateman. They brought the methods of inversive geometry into electromagnetic theory with their transformations (spherical wave transformation):
Each four-dimensional solution [to Maxwell's equations] could then be inverted in a four-dimensional hypersphere of pseudo-radius K in order to produce a new solution. Central to Cunningham's paper was the demonstration that Maxwell's equations retained their form under these transformations.
He worked with Karl Pearson in 1907 at University College London.
Cunningham married Ada Collins in 1908.
