A lost chapter in the pre-history of algebraic analysis: Whittaker on contact transformations (Q610713)

The paper describes certain results obtained by the mathematicians E.~T.~Whittaker, W.~H.~McCrea, and a~chemist W.~O.~Kermack in the 1930s. Although their discoveries did not influence the following development of mathematics and are now almost forgotten, it is interesting to observe that they introduced important concepts and ideas which now belong to the area of algebraic analysis. The author starts with short biographies of the three scientists and then proceeds to explain the idea of a contact transformation. These transformations were used by \textit{E. T. Whittaker} [Proc. Edinb. Math. Soc., II. Ser.~2, 189--204 (1931; Zbl 0002.26203)], which is discussed in the next part. McCrea and Kermack became familiar with these ideas during a research lecture delivered by Whittaker in Edinburgh, 1931. They attempted to fix certain gaps in Whittaker's proof and their results were published in a series of four journal articles, whose contents are analyzed in the present paper: \textit{W.~O.~Kermack} and \textit{W.~H.~McCrea} [Proc. Edinb. Math. Soc., II. Ser.~2, 205--219 (1931; Zbl 0002.26301), Part~II, Proc. Edinb. Math. Soc., II. Ser.~2, 220--239 (1931; Zbl 0002.26302); Proc. R. Soc. Edinb. 51, 176--189 (1931; Zbl 0004.11105); and Q. J. Math., Oxf. Ser. 4, 81--92 (1933; Zbl 0007.24603)]. As the author explains in the final discussion, the papers by McCrea and Kermack still lacked a sufficient rigor and the theory necessary to make their results precise wasn't available in the 1930s. This might have been one of the reasons why their work didn't meet with a great response; it seems that it came too early to be appreciated by other mathematicians.