Harry Bateman FRS[1] (29 May 1882 – 21 January 1946) was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics.

Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology.

Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in his Gibbs Lecture in 1943 titled, "The control of an elastic fluid".

Bateman studied with coach Robert Alfred Herman to prepare for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos.

Eric Temple Bell says, "Like his contemporaries and immediate predecessors among Cambridge mathematicians of the first decade of this century [1901–1910]... Bateman was thoroughly trained in both pure analysis and mathematical physics, and retained an equal interest in both throughout his scientific career.

I liked him.Harry Bateman married Ethel Horner in 1912 and had a son named Harry Graham, who died as a child.

Bateman, perhaps influenced by Hilbert's point of view in mathematical physics as a whole, was the first to see that the basic ideas of electromagnetism were equivalent to statements regarding integrals of differential forms, statements for which Grassmann's calculus of extension on differentiable manifolds, Poincaré's theories of Stokesian transformations and integral invariants, and Lie's theory of continuous groups could be fruitfully applied.

[18] In his Mathematical Analysis of Electrical and Optical Wave-motion (p. 131), he describes the charged-corpuscle trajectory as follows: a corpuscle has a kind of tube or thread attached to it.

He recalled Alfred-Marie Liénard's electromagnetic fields, and then distinguished another type he calls "aethereal fields": When a large number of "aethereal fields" are superposed their singular curves indicate the structure of an "aether" which is capable of supporting a certain type of electromagnetic field.Bateman received many honours for his contributions, including election to the American Philosophical Society in 1924, election to the Royal Society of London in 1928, and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1930.

[22] After his death, his notes on higher transcendental functions were edited by Arthur Erdélyi, Wilhelm Magnus, Fritz Oberhettinger [de], and Francesco G. Tricomi, and published in 1953.

[23] In a review of Bateman's book Partial Differential Equations of Mathematical Physics, Richard Courant says that "there is no other work which presents the analytical tools and the results achieved by means of them equally completely and with as many original contributions" and also "advanced students and research workers alike will read it with great benefit".