Edwin Bidwell Wilson

Edwin Bidwell Wilson (April 25, 1879 – December 28, 1964) was an American mathematician, statistician, physicist and general polymath.

[1] He was the sole protégé of Yale University physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs and was mentor to MIT economist Paul Samuelson.

Wilson made broad contributions to mathematics, statistics and aeronautics, and is well known for producing a number of widely used textbooks.

[4] Although born in Hartford, Wilson grew up in Middleton, and for a period he attended a private school that had been set up by his father, where he was substantially younger than the other students.

[6] At the age of fifteen, Wilson sat and passed the entrance examination for Yale University (his father's alma mater), but his father would not allow him to attend at this age, as he considered him too young; he waited until he was sixteen and then attended Harvard College, being admitted on the basis of his entrance examination at Yale.

[14] Wilson had a broad range of interests and skills, and he served in a number of distinguished roles in national academies for the arts and sciences.

[18] Doris Wilson graduated from McGill University in 1946 and became an analytical chemist working at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health.

[23] Wilson gave a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1904 in Heidelberg[24] where he summarised some further unpublished work by Gibbs (which he later published).