Earl D. Rainville

Professor Earl David Rainville (1907 – 1966) taught in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Michigan, where he began as an assistant professor in 1941.^[1] He studied at the University of Colorado,^[2] receiving his B.A. there in 1930 before going on to graduate studies at Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in 1939 under the supervision of Ruel Churchill.^[3] He died on April 29, 1966.^[4]

He was the author of several textbooks.

Books

• Linear Differential Invariance Under an Operator Related to the Laplace Transformation, Univ. of Michigan, 1940, reprinted from American Journal of Mathematics, vol. 62. (Rainville's Ph.D. thesis.)
• Intermediate Course in Differential Equations, Chapman & Hall, 1943.
• Analytic Geometry, with Clyde E. Love, Macmillan, 1955.
• Special Functions, Macmillan, 1960.^[5]
• Unified Calculus and Analytic Geometry, Macmillan, 1961.
• Differential and Integral Calculus, with Clyde E. Love, Macmillan, 1962.
• Laplace Transform: An Introduction, 1963.
• Intermediate Differential Equations, Macmillan, 1964.
• Infinite Series, Macmillan, 1967.
• Elementary Differential Equations, with Phillip E. Bedient, Macmillan, 1969. Eighth edition published by Prentice Hall, 1997, ISBN 0-13-508011-8.
• A Short Course in Differential Equations, with Phillip E. Bedient, Macmillan, 1969.

References

1. "Notes", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 47 (11): 850–855, 1941, doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1941-07553-1.
2. Louise Johnson Rosenbaum, Biographies of Women Mathematicians. Rainville is briefly mentioned as one of Rosenbaum's contemporaries at Colorado.
3. Earl D. Rainville at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
4. "News and Notices", American Mathematical Monthly, 73 (10): 1147–1148, 1966, ISSN 0002-9890.
5. Sheffer, I. M. (1960). "Review: Earl D. Rainville, Special functions". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 66 (6): 482–483. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1960-10507-1.