Eric Temple Bell (7 February 1883 – 21 December 1960) was a Scottish-born mathematician, educator and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life.

Bell was educated at Bedford Modern School,[3] where his teacher Edward Mann Langley inspired him to continue the study of mathematics.

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) logically rigorous.

[8] Bell wrote a book of biographical essays titled Men of Mathematics (one chapter of which was the first popular account of the 19th century mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya), which is still in print.

[10] The book inspired notable mathematicians including Julia Robinson,[11] John Forbes Nash, Jr.,[12] and Andrew Wiles[13] to begin careers in mathematics.

[10] Bell's later book Development of Mathematics has been less famous, but his biographer Constance Reid finds it has fewer weaknesses.

He had a knack for pithily summing up a man's character: Pythagoras, Bell said, whose mysticism had hobbled his mathematics, was "one-tenth genius, nine-tenths sheer fudge."