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Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker (24 October 1873 – 24 March 1956) was a British mathematician, physicist, and historian of science. Whittaker was a leading mathematical scholar of the early 20th century who contributed widely to applied mathematics and was renowned for his research in mathematical physics and numerical analysis, including the theory of special functions, along with his contributions to astronomy, celestial mechanics, the history of physics, and digital signal processing.
Among the most influential publications in Whittaker's bibliography, he authored several popular reference works in mathematics, physics, and the history of science, including A Course of Modern Analysis (better known as Whittaker and Watson), Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies, and A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity. Whittaker is also remembered for his role in the relativity priority dispute, as he credited Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz with developing special relativity in the second volume of his History, a dispute which has lasted several decades, though scientific consensus has remained with Einstein. Whittaker served as the Royal Astronomer of Ireland early in his career, a position he held from 1906 through 1912, before moving on to the chair of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh for the next three decades and, towards the end of his career, received the Copley Medal and was knighted. The School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh holds The Whittaker Colloquium, a yearly lecture, in his honour and the Edinburgh Mathematical Society promotes an outstanding young Scottish mathematician once every four years with the Sir Edmund Whittaker Memorial Prize, also given in his honour.

Whittaker was a Christian and became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church in 1930. In relation to that, Pope Pius XI awarded him with the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice in 1935 and appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936. He was a member of the academy from 1936 onward and served as Honorary President of the Newman Society from 1943 to 1945. Whittaker published two book-length works on the topic of Christianity, including The Beginning and End of the World and Space and Spirit. The first of which was the result of the 1942 Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham while the second is based on his 1946 Donnellan Lecture at Trinity College Dublin. It has been remarked by physics historian Helge Kragh, that in these books, Whittaker was "the only physical scientist of the first rank" who defended the strong entropic creation argument, which holds that as entropy always increases, the Universe must have started at a point of minimum entropy, which they argue implies the existence of a god.] Whittaker published several articles which draw connections between science, philosophy and theism between 1947 and 1952 in the BBC magazine The Listener, one of which Religion and the nature of the universe was republished in American Vogue, making him "a rare, if not unique, example of a man whose published work not only crossed disciplinary boundaries, but was published everywhere from Nature to Vogue." (Wikipedia)