Ian Sneddon

Ian Naismith Sneddon was a Scottish mathematician who worked on analysis and applied mathematics.

Life

Sneddon was born in Glasgow on 8 December 1919, the son of Mary Ann Cameron and Naismith Sneddon. He was educated at Hyndland School in Glasgow.
He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Glasgow, graduating with a BSc. He then went to the University of Cambridge, gaining an MA in 1941. From 1942 to 1945, during World War II, he served as a Scientific Officer to the Ministry of Supply. After the war he worked as a Research Officer for H H Wills Laboratory at the University of Bristol. In 1946, he began lecturing in Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.
In 1950, he received a professorship at University College of North Staffordshire. In 1956, he returned to the University of Glasgow as Professor of Mathematics.
In 1958, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Robert Alexander Rankin, Philip Ivor Dee, William Marshall Smart and Edward Copson. He won the Society's Makdougall-Brisbane Prize for the period 1956-58. In 1983, he was further elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
He retired in 1985, and died in Glasgow on 4 November 2000.

In 1943, he married Mary Campbell Macgregor.

Sneddon's research was published widely including:

with Nevill Mott: Wave mechanics and its applications, 1948
Fourier transforms, 1951
Special functions of mathematical physics and chemistry, 1956
Elements of partial differential equations, 1957
with James George Defares: An introduction to the mathematics of medicine and biology, 1960
Mixed boundary problems in potential theory, 1966
Lectures on transform methods, 1967
with Morton Lowengrub: Crack problems in the classical theory of elasticity, 1969
The use of integral transforms, 1972
The linear theory of thermoelasticity, 1974
Encyclopaedic dictionary of mathematics for engineers and applied scientists, 1976
The use of operators of fractional integration in applied mathematics, 1979
with E. L. Ince: The solution of ordinary differential equations, 1987
Awards and honours